Spammers Exploited “Easter” for Spam E-mails during March 2010

Security firm Symantec's most recent "April State of Spam and phishing Report" outlines that cyber-criminals concentrated on the recent Easter seasonal festival for the delivery of spam in March 2010.

The company noted that spam serves to indicate the existing economic situation, with several campaigns of junk e-mails leveraging on current events. Such events include the worldwide economic recession, bulk phishing pertaining to reputed electronic payment companies, and phishing involving Indian job recruitment websites, amongst others.

Furthermore, according to the report, there is a steep fall in spam projecting .cn URLs, along with an ongoing dramatic increase in e-mails having .ru domains during March 2010.
Additionally, during March 2010, the 10 most prevalent subject lines had the dominance of a few replica product and online pharmacy spam. spammers are still writing deceptive subject lines as they craft spam e-mails on online pharmacy, the report indicates.

It (the report) also reveals that the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) countries made their position as "King of Spam" more solid. This is because the region distributed 44.7% of the total spam in the world during March 2010, accounting for a 1.5% rise.

On the whole, spam accounted for 89.34% of the entire junk e-mail during March 2010 against 89.99% during February 2010.

Further, according to Symantec's report, phishing as well as scam e-mails made up 17% of the total spam during March 2010, accounting for a 2% decline from February 2010.

In addition, the security firm noted that phishing attacks fell 3% since February this year (2010). The main reason behind this is that the number of phishing assaults using automated toolkits has come down.

Moreover, Symantec also observed that 9% of the total phishing URLs came into existence through the use of automated kits, representing a 35% fall since February 2010.

Finally, the company reports that the number of unique IP and URL attacks increased in March 2010. Number of IP attacks rose 4% and number of URLs rose 1.5% over February 2010. Besides, non-English phishing websites were seen to fall 9% from February 2010, mainly because of a decline in phishing attacks in Italian and French languages.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 4/20/2010