Bangkok--30 Jun--APPR Media
Spam made up 89.81 percent of all messages in May, compared with 89.22 percent in April. As we are approaching mid-year, a section of this month’s report takes a look at top spam and phishing trends in 2010 so far, and how those trends are continuing today. Also get to know what’s being considered as the most annoying spam this month.
With social networks continuing to add millions of users to its overall user base, crafty spammers are taking advantage of the popularity of these networks to design new spamming techniques week after week. The State of Spam & Phishing report for this month provides a deep dive on social network spam, highlighting some unique and dangerous techniques deployed by spammers.
Other interesting features in this month’s report include the increase in .ru spam and EMEA’s march towards sending half of the world’s spam.
On the phishing front, Symantec observed a 9 percent decrease in overall phishing attacks from the previous month. The decrease was contributed to all sectors of phishing. Phishing websites generated from automated phishing toolkits comprised 12 percent of all phishing, a decrease of 3 percent from the previous month. Unique URLs decreased by 10 percent from the previous month. About 93 webhosting services were used that comprised 11 percent of all phishing, an increase of 6 percent from the previous month. The number of phishing websites in non-English languages was nearly the same as the previous month. Among non-English phishing websites, attacks in French and Italian languages were found to be higher in May. Phishing in French was mostly from the E-commerce and banking sector and attacks in Italian were mostly on banking.
The following trends are highlighted in the June 2010 report:
Deep Dive into Social Network Spam
There is no doubt that social networks are on the rise. One prominent social network reports that there are more than 400 million active users. With its growing popularity, it is not a surprise to see that spammers have hijacked the brands to send spam. Spammers will look at and use every feature that makes a social network, a social network.
In this example, spammers crafted the message in a way that resembles an official notification email from the social network. When users click to read this “important notification”, they are led to a different site: http://odnbo.[DOMAIN REDACTED].net/wharton.html
This particular URL is an example of a hijacked domain where the spammer gained unauthorized access to a legitimate server and places an HTML file. This helps the spammer avoid getting filtered based on URL reputation. While the HTML file on the hijacked domain sometimes serves as a mean to deliver the spam content, this spam used a redirect technique to direct the user to yet another site (online pharmacy). Closely examining the HTML