Image Spam Back in Business

Image spam has made a strong return in April 2009. AppRiver's May Spam Report reveals that image spam surged more than 300% during the month.

AppRiver's security researchers commented that after witnessing the volume of image spam exceeding the collective figures of January and February, it was really astonishing to see such a tremendous increase.

In April 2009, AppRiver has blocked approx 610 Million image spams. Over 6% of the entire spam traffic was made up by image spam that is the highest level recorded in more than 12 months. Following the trend, majority of image spam are related to pharma products, however there is a good mix of others also.

Apart from the rebound of image spam, AppRiver also observed the fresh use of the file extension .png as the most popular way to deliver spam. Spam containing the file extension .png surged up to 500 Million in April this year from the level of 100 Million a month ago.

According to the report, bulk of spam has typically evolved from North America, Europe and Asia. South America saw a strong upsurge in the spam generation accounting for nearly 20% of the total spam output registered in April 2009, giving a tough competition to Asia at 22%.

As far as country-wise figures are concerned, Brazil outshined everybody else by generating highest number of spam messages, while the US, Turkey, India, Russia, Poland, Korea, Columbia, Ukraine and Romania followed in sequence.

The report also highlights the appearances of Waledac botnet in April, which includes a massive campaign involving the use of URLs of GeoCities to promote gambling on the Internet, a bogus product "SMS Spy" for spying on the users' important other's text e-mails, etc.

And lastly, the news related to the major health scare "Swine Flu" that evolved in April 2009 was also readily exploited by the spammers who accordingly tailored their campaigns. It is a traditional method adopted by spammers as it is obvious from the past incidents where users were tricked into opening e-mails relating to earthquake that struck Italy or the fake IRS tax refunds.

However, AppRiver's report indicates towards the decline in number of viruses embedded in spam e-mails during the month of April.

Related article: Image Spam Set to Hit Worldwide PCs Back

» SPAMfighter News - 5/13/2009