Spam Level Not Coming Down - MessageLabs’ Intelligence Report

According to the intelligence report released by MessageLabs for the month of April 2009, almost 10% increase was registered in spam during the month, which reached the level of 85.3%. Such a high level has not been seen after September 2007.

MessageLabs' report states that the technique of launching image spam has underwent transformation. Now, spammers host image spam on reliable sites while taking the advantage of redirecting links from reputed sites so as to conceal the correct location where the image actually hosts.

Some of the other techniques that spammers used to go undetected, in April 2009, comprised of some standard e-mail text, like privacy links and unnecessary services that have not been subscribed. All these techniques were employed to look legitimate and legal, for instance, CAN-SPAM in US, as per the report.

Paul Wood, Senior Analyst at MessageLabs, noted that security experts are ready to deal the image spam and so, cyber criminals need to revive their tactics significantly in order to give a tough competition to them, as reported by The Earth Times on April 28, 2009.

Moreover, the high profile G20 Summit was also a hot topic that led to the increase in the number of targeted malware assaults. In Q1 2009, nearly 60 malware attacks were recorded that targeted the summit and the figure increased to 100 during the course of the summit.

Besides, in April 2009, number of malware infected sites intercepted in a day continued rising significantly, with average interceptions per day amounting to 3,561. This rise was mainly on account of a sequence of threats, such as those drive-by Trojan malware, malware concealed as .gif's (though being executable files), IFRAME HTML tags that are malicious, and Trojan embedded in PDF files.

In addition to this, volume of viruses also surged in April 2009, majority of them being in the United States and Australia.

Wood also added that economic crunch is in the concerns of most of the people around the world and cyber criminals are no exception. So far, several phishing attacks and spam related to recession have already been detected in 2009. Thus, users should be cautious while being online, particularly in the present economically challenging time.

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» SPAMfighter News - 5/4/2009