Spam Attacks Increase by 30% in 2010

In 2010, spam attacks will increase by an alarming 30% as compared to 2009. They depict a continuous danger to the safety of enterprise networks and corporate information, as per CISCO's Midyear Security Report, 2010.

The report also emphasizes that between November (2009) and June (2010), the United States again remained the top most spam producing country globally, bringing down Brazil to third place (which kept the topmost position for few months). In totality, the spam level actually decreased in both the countries. However, the total spam percentage at the global level from Brazil (-4.3%) declined massively as compared to the United States (-0.56%).

As per the Cisco security researchers, the decline in Brazil spam level can be attributed to the increasing Brazilian ISPs limiting Port 25 entry, a crucial spam-blocking method. The second place is occupied by India, while Russia and South Korea come among the top five.

Other countries on the top ten list (in addition to the above countries) are Vietnam with 3.74%, Ukraine (3.60%), Germany (3.34%), China (3.22%) and Italy (2.80%).

Although not on the topmost list, two other most spamming countries are the United Kingdom (2.74%) and Colombia (2.58%).

As per the Cisco's mid-year report, 2010, the multivector spam threats are increasing. Cyber criminals continuously target authentic websites, but are initiating specifically timed, multivector spam attacks to set up keyloggers, back doors and bots.

For example, cyber criminals sent a huge number of spam emails targeting the immensely popular Apple store customers in the end of March, 2010. Cyber criminals timed their attack artfully just before the inauguration of Apple's iPad, coordinated their attacks with many other authentic websites and spam pretending to be an Apple Store notice with connections to the fake websites. The attack directed the compromised traffic to some Canadian pharmacy website, which provided a false antivirus Trojan.

Moreover, the technological inventions are exploited by cyber criminals to their benefit. They take the advantage of the gap between how fast they explore to profit from vulnerabilities and the rate at which organizations set up advanced technologies to guard their networks.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 8/3/2010