Spammers to Exploit Economic Crisis in 2009

As per Symantec's recent report, spam levels are set to grow further next year (2009) as perpetrators would attempt to exploit the world economic meltdown as well as the popularity of social networking sites.

The security company further says that the onslaught of spam would essentially involve phishing scams. E-mail messages that would talk of a certain bank's closure aiming to falsely spread fear are few examples.

Similarly, scams would also take advantage of other situations like financing and housing crisis by sending e-mails promising easy refinancing and mortgage. Unfortunately, the security specialists revealed that people who are already feeling the brunt of the economic crisis by losing their jobs or by having their homes foreclosed would be the key victims of these phishing campaigns.

Meanwhile, Symantec said that it found a rise in spam pertaining to social networking sites in 2008. These attacks have comprised phishing for account information. According to Symantec, spammers have been increasingly promoting sites for social networking.

In 2009, security officials also expect that spam would upgrade to the use of correct names, sophisticatedly partitioned on the basis of market or demography. Such spam would look like special offers and legitimate messages created by using private information extracted from social networks as well as might seem to arrive from a friend within a social network. Once an individual is victimized, the spam could easily be disseminated through his/her social network.

Theses kinds of threats, according to Symantec, would become increasingly significant for enterprises as workers frequently access social networking websites on their office PCs. Here, hackers' objective might be to steal the employees' passwords to gain access to organizations' computer systems. And because of these trends, Symantec predicts spam would make up for 80% of the total e-mail messages at any point in time in 2009.

Moreover, there would be the re-establishment of command-and-control systems in 2009, and more significantly, this development might drive spammers to use P2P botnets that are usually more resilient. As the economic crisis would increasingly affect industries, Symantec said there would be a rise in organizations that would assist spam for profit.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 1/5/2009