Six Major Types of Spam Dominated Internet in June 2008

Secure Computing Corp. has released its monthly report on spam trends currently circulating on the net. Researchers at Secure Computing revealed that six major spam waves dominated the Web in June 2008.

As per Secure Computing, the most common type of spam used by criminals is phishing, where an e-mail containing a link to illegitimate Website is sent to users. These Websites are imitation of legitimate sites (of some bank or online shopping) and request for personal information like account number of the recipient.

But new and interesting types of spam have emerged in past few years, each exploiting the weaknesses of different users. Among these, fashion spam sites are generally used to sell overstocked or replica goods by promising good quality and huge discounts. Fashion spam is circulating on the net for sometime and promises discounts on branded merchandise. In contrast, loan spam exploits the financial needs of people by offering them hassle-free financial solutions but make the situation worse by taking over the PC.

Moreover, considering the financial difficulties people are facing currently, there should be no surprise that spammers are trying to capitalize on it. Attractive offers given by loan officers with attractive taglines like 'they are just a click away from ending their financial problems' encourage people to follow the links that take them to a Trojaned workstation or induce them to furnish their private information. Also, spammers are attracting people to hacked site by using a new spam of winning a BlackBerry phone for free.

Penny Stock Spam is another new entrant in the field of e-mail. In this spamming technique, spammers purchase stocks in big amounts and launch an e-mail campaign to popularize it. Later on, they sell the stock before being captured and made huge gains. And last is the fake headline spam in which a user is convinced that he would get abundant information on real, and even fake, news story.

Moreover, fake headline spam is not a new technique as there were several scams noticed in June 2008 that used fake headline method. This type of spam contains breaking news to attract users and encourage them to click on link that provides Trojaned executable that starts working as soon as the user clicks on the link.

Related article: SEC Imposes Trading Ban on 35 Companies

» SPAMfighter News - 8/5/2008