Incredible Hike for E-Mail Spam, Says M86 Security

M86 Security reports that malicious junk e-mails have increased significantly, largely surpassing anything the company observed during 2009-10. ITPro published this on August 17, 2011.

The company also notes that the spam mail distributors, trying to take revenge, have returned taking e-mail spam to "epic" levels during August 2011.

Most of the junk e-mails emanate from the well-known Cutwail botnet albeit Asprox and Festi make their contributions too.

During the 2nd-week of August 2011, unsolicited spam accounted for 13% of all e-mail that's unexpected, while on August 15, 2011, the rate shot up to 24%.

M86 Security further revealed the rate at which malicious spam increased category-wise. Accordingly, the category of pharmaceutical spam was on No.1, accounting for 39.8% of the total e-mail; betting came on No.2 at 25.09%, while dating ranked No.3 at 14.02%. Other categories included malware -13.01%, replicas -5.94%, diplomas -0.74%, adult -0.23%, finance -0.13% and scams -0.07%.

The security company placed phishing and software categories on the lowest rung of the list, claiming their contribution at 0.01% each.

Aside these, M86 also disclosed that 4 spam runs out of the total the company found emanating from Cutwail were largely recycled spam topics related to Fedex, invoices, changelogs and credit cards.

Furthermore, according to the company, the malware was sent through a ZIP file attachment and it was one Trojan, which pulled down more malware like SpyEye, Fake anti-virus and the spam bot namely Cutwail itself.

And while conducting the research, M86 discerned the 2 latest scams that backed its report's outcomes. Accordingly, the security company discovered that spammers applied standard tactics such as promising e-mail recipients additional information within a given attachment, or telling them about their credit card accounts being deactivated. If these attachments were viewed, they risked users with computer infection.

In the meantime, another spam campaign is dispatching malevolent hotel transaction e-mails wherein the attachment contains an installer of fake anti-virus and a password snatcher.

Conclusively, the current spam level represents a highest amount. Moreover, despite several botnet closures lately, cyber-criminals have displayed resilience, clearly seeking for re-constructing their botnets as also disseminating more bogus anti-viruses.

Related article: Increasing Security Breaches in Canada Causing Loss of $637,000 a year

» SPAMfighter News - 8/26/2011