Seasonal Spam On a Surge

As per MessageLabs Intelligence Report for October there is an increase in seasonal spam which includes Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day as well as a rise in phishing attacks related to tax deadlines in the UK and Australia.

The firm cautioned that Christmas-related spam has begun to emerge early this year, usually originating from the Cutwail botnet. As per the Internet security firm Symantec, these are trying to sell duplicate watches.

In mid-October, MessageLabs started seeing Halloween-based spam mails, accounting for 0.5% of total spam rising progressively and touching the peak of 500 Million e-mails circulating globally everyday with the holiday approaching closer.

Firm stated that the bulk of Halloween-based mails have come from one of the largest botnets known as Rustock and also the Donbot and seem to be promoting pharmaceutical or software products.

Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, said that as expected with spammers at this time of year, the firm has witnessed them to capitalize on holiday season, as per the news published by Marketwire on October 27, 2009.

Wood also declared that though spammers may be slightly overzealous, spamming is a game of numbers and they have so far succeeded with numbers. Maybe their approach of early-bird is an effort to compete with the other botnets and get in quickly to enhance their success chances.

The firm has also been examining heave in the number of phishing mails purporting to be coming from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in October.

The company stated that these mails estimated for 81% of total phishing mails in the UK on 13th October. This corresponds with authentic reminders from HMRC about the 31 October deadline for handing in self-assessment forms for the 2008-09 tax year.

Further, the links in these mails take the victim to a site that smartly imitates the HMRC website, but the suffix of the Web address acts as a give away; mostly being hmrc.co.uk instead of the official .gov suffix.

Further, as per the report, spam traffic rose by 1.7% from September to October. Denmark was the most-spammed country in the world in October, with 96.2% of its total e-mail traffic being spam. In the US, the level was 94% and in the UK it was 93.3%.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/9/2009