Spammers Utilized Spam, Economic Crisis and Threat for Murder during September: Kaspersky

According to one recently-released September 2011 spam report by Kaspersky Lab, spammers, during the month, used many fresh and advanced tactics of social-engineering for deceiving unwitting end-users, thus published CBR dated October 19, 2011.

Evidently, with primary attention on overall spam mails within total e-mail, the report shows that such malicious e-mail traffic fell 1.5% since August 2011, while its mean rate was 78.5%.

Moreover, September 2011 as well witnessed spammers abusing gossips surrounding the ongoing critical situation of world-finance within the captions and message bodies of their e-mails. There were also innumerable e-mails presenting get-rich-quick plans, pushing consulting/legal advises along with the infamous "Nigerian scam e-mails," promising loans to overcome the crisis, Kaspersky reports.

Naturally, similar to any highly significant breaking news, several spam campaigns simply crafted captions around the recession to grab attention even though the messages were little related to finance.

Further according to Kaspersky, one particular electronic mail within a Nigerian e-mail fraud, threatened pretty directly. It asserted that the message's sender was some contract killer commanded for taking the recipient's life. However, the assassin wouldn't harm the user, despite betraying his boss, if the person paid $8,000. CBR reported this.

Next, in one other technique, the spammers modified an August 2011 tactic wherein an e-mail having a malevolent file attachment appeared to be a brief formal note, though incorrectly coded. Consequently, recipients got curious and tempted for viewing the attachment.

Meanwhile, similar to August 2011, the sole e-mail virus, which got ranked on the September 2011 e-threats list, was the E-mail-Worm.Win32.Mydoom.m.

Conversely, the 5 major sources of spam comprising September 2011 list showed little alteration over August 2011, albeit the positioning of a few countries were interchanged. Accordingly, India was on No.1, accounting for 14.1% of the entire junk e-mails, followed with Brazil at 10.1%, Indonesia -9%, South Korea -7.3%, and Peru -4.9%.

Additionally, there was a little over 45% of worldwide e-mail junk from the above South American and Asian countries.

Lastly, the company as well informs that malevolent e-mails, during September 2011, accounted for 4.5% of the total e-mail, representing a 1.4% decline from August 2011.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 10/26/2011