Huge Spike in Number of Infected Emails During September 2010

E-mail security vendor AppRiver recently released its monthly report for September 2010. The report revealed that in spite of the spam traffic being on a declining trend during September 2010, there was a massive spike in the number of infected e-mails. Some of the main factors that contributed to this unusual increase included some widespread threats such as the "Here You Have" worm amongst others.

Besides, Fortinet's latest report has highlighted the increased IRS phishing campaigns during September 2010, in a variety of different forms. Some of these IRS phishing campaigns utilized custom designed .html documents while others tried to scam recipients by appearing as if they have come from the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System.

Additionally, during mid September 2010, one more malicious phishing campaign came into limelight, when cybercriminals designed an e-mail that pretended as an "Evite" to scam users into opening the linked attachments and hence infecting their systems with malware.

Besides, according to the firm's report, another type of junk of emails called the image spam witnessed a considerable increase during September 2010. This technique is quite old targeted at scamming easy anti-spam filters. Researchers at the AppRiver highlighted that while it was not unusual to see this method being employed, rates of these spam increased by nearly 900% on a regular basis after September 10th (2010).

With respect to spam origin, Europe was on no. 1 with 35.8% of all spam e-mail traffic. Following Europe closely was Asia at no. 2 with 33.4%. North America bagged the third rank with 14.9%.

Furthermore, Zeus Trojans, Bredolab, and the regular Oficla, which come inside the archives linked to socially engineered e-mails, were also the prominent names of September 2010 that registered a strong presence.

In addition, the firm stated that the Pushdo botnet, which was blocked down in August 2010, started its activities once again. Although the amount of spam immediately lessened after the shutdown on a regular basis, it did not stop fully. Rather, Pushdo botnet launched a campaign in early September (2010) to show the world that it still exists. This campaign was quite short and the e-mails were created after Pushdo's favorite website Facebook.

Related article: Hack.Huigezi Virus Attacks China PCs Rapidly

» SPAMfighter News - 10/9/2010