More Spam Likely to Hit Inboxes Manipulating Olympic Theme

According to Symantec's most recent edition of "The State of Spam" report for July 2008, spam currently makes up 80% of the global e-mail traffic compared to about 56% in 2006.

Also, as per the report, Europe continues to lead by generating 43% of spam worldwide. North America reportedly contributed around 28% of total spam, while about 17% emerged from the Asia-Pacific and Japan region.

While Symantec released the above statistics, another security company, Sophos, released data in April 2008 which highlighted that spam constituted more than 92% of total e-mail during Q1 2008.

Meanwhile, in June 2008, Symantec observed a surge in spam mails posing to have arrived from the 'Beijing Olympic Committee' and the official Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee for Games.

According to Symantec, the fraudulent messages announce the names of those people who have won in Olympic promotion lottery. But, to collect the prize money, the recipient is instructed to contact with the courier firm and provides his private information so that the lottery prize would be delivered to him.

However, with Olympics approaching fast, Symantec said that more spam and fraud messages are expected to emerge.

Apart from this, in June 2008, the security provider reported simplifying of e-mail harvesting tactics by certain spammers to launch attacks. Beginning with an e-mail address list obtained through dubious means, the spam mailers attempted to dispatch a message containing certain offers to people interested in getting offers. The offers asked if the recipient wanted to purchase any stuff that could be poem software, pills, or cool porn. If yes, he just needed to e-mail back so that the most appropriate offer could be found for him.

Symantec's July 2008 monthly report further delineated a new kind of spam scam in which the spoof message arriving from the spam mailers appears to be a 419 scam, popularly called the Nigerian scam. However, a closer scrutiny suggested that it is merely another mode of executing a phony Internet scam. The only change that the spammers made is that they sent the e-mail from an end-user's compromised webmail account to all his personal contacts.

Related article: More Requests For Better E-Mail and Spam Control

» SPAMfighter News - 7/25/2008