Universities & ISPs Became Top Target of Attackers in Q2 2008

According to Q2 2008 E-Mail Threat Trend report by Cyberoam in association with Commtouch, in second quarter of 2008, cyber criminals targeted various user groups, particularly ISPs, Hotmail subscribers, Google adwords and educational institutions.

Cyber criminals used the most trusted source - media - to wage attacks aimed at exploiting the psychological behavior of larger groups. As per the report, zombie botnet masters targeted ISPs by exploiting ISP infrastructure to send the spam payload.

The report also said that nearly 10 Million zombies were detected in the second quarter of 2008 and majority of them were result of active IP addresses. Moreover, the zombie computers deactivated many IPs, made them vulnerable to new attacks, and transferring from one IP to another to avoid the traditional security measures.

Besides, spam and phishing messages continued to make more victims as they succeeded in acquiring sensitive personal information such as credit card numbers and banking passwords, said the report. Some of these messages pretended to have come from IT departments, encouraging users, particularly faculty members and university students, to disclose their personal information.

The study also revealed that spammers used a new kind of Bayesian poisoning where they employed disclaimer message content of Hotmail messages to successfully evade content-based filters. The message also included links to hosted images of pharma ads. The Hotmail disclaimer lowers the security of user's system and the user confirmed his e-mail ID's validity by viewing the image, which spammers use for future attacks.

Furthermore, the attacks employing socially engineered subject lines were also noticed in the second quarter, and were aimed at blogger community and the US taxpayers. Some of these attacks exploited the human sentiment and asked for aid to help Chinese earthquake victims but they contained malicious links which took users to nasty sites.

According to Abhilash Sonwane, VP of Product Management Department, Cyberoam, spammers are using new and innovative techniques to attack Internet users, making the duplicity more powerful in the virtual world. New and vulnerable user groups are targeted by spammers through sensitive methods that can mislead even the experienced personnel in the industry, as reported by CommuniGate on July 28, 2008.

Related article: University Reports Increase in Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 8/5/2008