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Phishing Tops the Chart in AppRiver’s Annual Report 2009

AppRiver, a leading e-mail messaging and Web security solutions purveyor, recently released 'State of Security 2009', its year-end virus and spam report in the second week of January 2010.

According to Fred Touchette, firm's senior security analyst, cybercrime, spam and both software and Web vulnerabilities were quite active in 2009, as reported by r-inside.com on January 13, 2010.

However, all through 2009, phishing continued to be a consistent threat, attacking users on day-to-day basis in varied forms. The most popular method to phish people was botnets; however, various other social engineering tactics were also used. Governmental agencies like the IRS, social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, and local and national banks were mainly imitated.

Major events like the King of Pop Michael Jackson's demise and the outbreak of HINI pandemic were also exploited by spammers. Besides this, data breaches also hit the Heartland and Countrywide.

In early 2009, the Conficker botnet created hype along with Waledac, yet another botnet which made news same year. Further, near around October 2009, the ZeuS Trojan aroused like gangbusters, and since then, the botnet has not shown any signs of retarding. It appears that Pushdo, one of the largest botnets running at present, is delivering this Trojan.

Now-a-days, Do-it-Yourself (DIY) ZeuS Trojan kits are extensively available on the black market for just $400, thereby giving immense profit potential to cyber assailants.

Also, as noted by the latest report, Europe in 2009 remained the leading region generating spam, though Brazil led the countries producing spam, with 9 Billion spam messages. Yet another noteworthy point was that Korea's spam production doubled in 2009 as compared to the output in 2008.

The firm also reviewed various other cybercrime events which were prominent in 2009 like the spammers' favorite URL shortening services. Risks associated with this tactic are that a user automatically gets redirected to phishing sites, various spam-related materials or a malicious page on clicking these links. Last but not the least, MP3 spamming, which was last seen in October 2007, made a comeback last year.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 1/22/2010

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