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Spam Comprised 86.6% of All Messages during October 2010

As per a latest study by the security firm Symantec spam encompassed 86.6% of all the messages in October 2010, in comparison to the 89.4% in September 2010. According to the firm, there was a considerable reduction in the global spam volume, with a sharp decline of 47% during August to October 2010, which was the lowest amount of spam observed since September 2009.

This decline is due to the latest shut down of several spam campaign and spammers' arrest. Security experts at the security firm Symantec highlighted that during October 2010, the Netherlands authorities shut down many servers linked with the Bredolab botnet. This measure followed the shutdown of Spamit.com in September 2010, which was a major player in the pharmaceutical spam gang and detentions in the US, UK, and Ukraine suspected members of Zeus phishing Trojan ring.

Commenting on the matter, Eric Park, Symantec's Abuse Desk Analyst stated that, they had taken many legal actions lately. Overall, those events had a sort of upset in spam volumes, which was quite hard to identify, as reported by CRN on November 11, 2010.

Park further highlighted that the declining trend seems to be continuing during the holiday seasons, though not as quickly. Spam levels seemed to have alleviated during November (2010), but was only down around 5 to 6% compared to October (2010).

However, the situation is probable to change. Park commented that, the amount of spam would most likely return to where they were originally before the several takedowns, probably during the forthcoming six months.

Furthermore, the occurrence of phishing spam attacks, however, augmented somewhat by around 0.3% from September to October (2010), because of the crooks' more prevalent utilization of automated crimeware toolkits. While majority of the phishing attacks were still executed through e-mail during October (2010), 4% came through social networking websites.

Several of these social networking phishing attacks attacked not only monetary information, but also users' social networking credentials. Symantec highlighted that during October 2010, a general kind of bait noticed was phishing websites that asserted to be from the security service of the social networking brand, as reported by InformationWeek on November 11, 2010. According to the security firm, end users were encouraged to furnish their login credentials to continue their access to the social networking website.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

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