Obama Evolves as the Most Popular Spam Subject

Security company McAfee's 'January 2010 Spam Trend Report' released in the second week of January 2009 states that President Barack Obama surfaced as the most famous spam subject personality in December 2009.

Anti-Spam Technology Head for McAfee Labs, Adam Wosotowsy, who is also one of the co-authors of the study, informed that it was amazing that Obama is so popular subject among cybercriminals, as per the reports by crn.com on January 11, 2010.

The researchers at McAfee stated that the leading 25 most famous male and female celebrity spam subjects have been always surprising.

The report revealed that Michael Jackson, George Bush and Brad Pitt followed Barack Obama. Similarly, Oprah Winfrey, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears followed Angelina Jolie among the most popular female celeb spam subjects.

The report also highlighted that there was an increase in spam volume in mid-December 2009. Particularly, researchers informed that they witnessed a 70% rise in spam volume between the starting and end of December 2009, ascribed to a vast uptick of pharmaceutical spam in guise of Chinese newsletter pharmacy mails with subject "Pfizer 80% off" and carrying pictures of Viagra pills.

In January 2010 Spam Report, McAfee took into account the rising trend of spammers registering for free subdomains as well as complimentary Web hosting.

Authors of the McAfee's annual report have written that using a free Web hosting service is a best technique that spammers can use as it simpler to automatically obstruct a recently infected site as compared to blocking a website that has been existing for a longer time and has perhaps had genuine traffic connected to it, as per the news by thewhir.com on January 11, 2010.

This advantage offers the criminals some extra hours before that host is blacklisted by international spam-blocking services. It is noted that a botnet is capable of producing billions of spam messages in just a few hours.

Lastly, as per the McAfee's report, a Web-hosting service Ocatch.com serves numerous free-hosting sites to unknown people, and seems to do nothing to stop botmasters and spammers from hosting malicious programs.

Related article: Open SSL Flaw Invites Forgery

» SPAMfighter News - 21-01-2010

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