Cyber Criminals Launch Spam Campaigns Via New Techniques

A German-based e-mail security provider, Eleven, has released a warning that computer users should remain careful of spam campaigns that use new tricks designed by spammers to successfully accomplish their spamming motives.

As per the security company, the e-mail messages embed with an HTML attachment that activates a JavaScript if a computer user clicks on the attachment. JavaScript takes that user's browser to spammers target website. The method used help to by pass spam filters that search for links to known phishing websites or spam in the e-mail content. The method makes the detection more difficult.

Eleven also published its "E-Mail Security Report" that highlighted a substantial increase in the volume of spam which accounted for 96.2% of the total e-mail traffic in May 2010. A large number of spam e-mails (87%) were related to pharmaceuticals, advertising drugs such as Viagra. One of the spam mail detected by Eleven took users to a social networking website used for phishing activities in the past.

In April and May, spam distribution spread uniformly in different countries as compared to the previous months. This indicates that botnets should spread more and more regions. Spam forwarded from the US IP addresses were at the top position in terms of geographic distributions of spam and accounted for 8% of the total spam e-mails. This is followed by Germany at 7.8%, India at 7.3% and Brazil at 7.2%.

The spam campaign discovered by Eleven contain different subject lines and topics to encourage recipients open the attached files. These titles include - password reset request with the help of name of a known social networking platform, bogus confirmation of domain registrations and personal messages with subjects like "You Are My Sunshine" and "You're My Everything."

Moreover, it is not just 'Eleven' that has reported an increase in spammers activities, but also some other firms recorded the same increment. For instance - another security firm 'Avira' reported in mid May 2010 that these transaction became more common now-a-days. Cyber criminals invented new spam mail filter bypassing methods - first, they replaced the spam mail text with graphics and then use slightly distorted images to bypass even OCR (Optical Character Recognition) by anti-spam products such as spam filters.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 7/5/2010