Pharma Spam Most Notorious Type During 2010

Trend Micro, in its recently released report, highlights that during 2010, the kind of spam, which was most widespread, was one that centered on pharma-related themes despite the junk e-mails not always taking onto fake pharmacy sites.

Incidentally, a very prominent spam at all times has been medicine, and this has been still more intensive during 2010 since phishers and malware purveyors too used the same topic.

Additionally, many other incidences of junk e-mails, which though didn't center on pharma topics themselves, but web-links embedded on them took users onto fake medicinal sites.

Interestingly, a large number of spam mails tended to deliver their messages through attachments as well, in addition to the usual main message body, like medical spam that had condensed ZIP files with images within attachments.

In particular, the distribution of rogue pharmacy websites was extremely troublesome to the extent that even Internet giant Google had to increase its efforts towards combating them. Google declared suing many advertisers because they intentionally breached its policies while disseminating medicine-related e-mail junk through its advertisement network.

Moreover, alongside medical spam, there were other spam outbreaks also which contained malevolent web-links or files, proliferating "mal-spam" alternatively malware-related spam during 2010. Spam using hot news events whether true or fictional too prevailed like a famous film star supposedly meeting with an accident in a motorcar, while they carried an attachment or web-link which pointed to malware. Further, there were mal-spams that presented e-card attachments that tricked users into clicking malevolent web-links alternatively opening harmful attachments.

What's more, phishing attacks that usually aim on banks, this time gradually concentrated on widely visited social-networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Occasionally, web-links within e-mails diverted end-users onto bogus sites that captured the users' personal credentials. In other cases, they took end-users onto associate marketing websites like replica product or pharmacy sites.

Unfortunately, according to security researchers, with the affiliate program Spamit's takedown that had been associated with product promotion e-mail spam, the drop in pharma spam didn't extend too long. Whatever void the Canadian Pharmacy left got filled in with other affiliate schemes' spam and rather fast.

Related article: Porn Links Overflow Irish Message Boards

» SPAMfighter News - 1/10/2011