Tax Season Sees Massive Inflow of Scam Mail: Appriver

Appriver, a highly reputed provider of e-mail messaging and web security solution revealed recently of a massive threat and scamscape report on April 2012, according to which, among 84% of the e-mail surveyed are claimed to be scam.

One of the primary highlight of the report states the ways by which, scammers intervene the net during a tax season, particularly aiming the tax preparers. From the past week scammers have been utilizing "black hole" toolkit that send virus encrypted e-mails, that masquerades to be sent from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and sometimes also from an Intuit, which is highly recognized for their software related to accounting. Authentic looking graphics and presentation with a proper format are sent to recipients, primarily the accounting professionals involved in fake-filling practice, details of which, can be viewed in a PDF file attached with the e-mail. Actually the attachment is linked to the malware website.

According to an interesting development by Fred Touchette, Senior Security Analyst at Appriver, with billions of dollars changing hands online, tax season is a prime time for internet scams, as per the statement published in hostview on April 4, 2012.

Scam e-mails seems to be sent from social networking websites, such as LinkedIn source, PayPal, US Airways, Career Builder, the United states postal services (USPS) and others, that have been making aggressive moves towards inboxes. The malicious sites used in the campaigns are serving up a lot of exploits aiming at Adobe Acrobat and Java platforms, among others by circulating the massive, Zeus Trojan, as per the highlights revealed in the last report.

Also the report highlights the top countries which are the source of the scam as of March 2012. A point in the spam traffic from the United States drove it to regain the number one spot, overtaking India once again. Others countries following the line include Russia, Vietnam, and Indonesia and many others.

Interestingly, the latest report also shed light on computer Trojan by the name of Matsnu, possibly spawned from the spy eye Trojan toolkit, which looks like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) along with security company trustees. Besides, the report also revealed a Blackhole toolkit that purports as e-mails from Certified Public Accountants and sometimes also from an Intuit, which is a company renowned for book-keeping and tax-related software. Tax-related fake software is on hype during the tax season.

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» SPAMfighter News - 4/17/2012