Moderation of Economic Conditions Changes Spam Content

A new Kaspersky's report "Spam evolution: July-September 2009", which discusses about spam volume and methods, has discovered a direct link between spam content and economic conditions. As per the report, spammers have changed their methods with the transformation of economic conditions.

Decline in economy has caused attackers to lose some clients, indicating that they have had to promote their own services in self-promotional spam mail to run business. Moderation in economic conditions has resulted in the resurrection of spam advertising goods and services provided by spammers' clients, implying that spammers are now receiving sufficient business, and they don't need to promote their own services to prospective clients.

The share of spam in total mail traffic declined in the months of summer, following a conventional pattern. During September 2009, the spam volume started to rise again.

On September 27, 2009, a peak of 91.3% was reported while a low of 76.3% had been witnessed on August 1, 2009 - this was the only instance in the quarter when the proportion of spam fell below 80%, said the report.

The report said that phishing e-mails rose by 0.5% to average 1.77% of the overall volume of mail traffic, highlight a new approach of phishers to use telephone numbers in place of fake URLs to gather account details.

As earlier, eBay and PayPal were the most attacked resources. August's share of phishing attacks hitting PayPal and eBay plunged significantly, providing space to a huge number of attacks on the banking enterprise.

Further, the proportion of messages carrying harmful attachments increased, averaging 0.46% of the overall volume of mail traffic. September 2009 proved to have been the busiest month for malware attachments and was hugely accountable for higher than the normal quarterly figure.

According to Kaspersky security experts, the changes in spam category distribution were totally rational. As anticipated, the spam situation shows what was happening in the economy. The economic recession that began in 2008 led to a reduction in the quantity of mass mailings. The present moderation of the economic crisis has witnessed a renewal of this kind of spam.

Related article: Moderately Critical Vulnerability Found in OpenOffice

» SPAMfighter News - 12/4/2009