December 2012 has Spam Focusing on Amazon, PayPal and LinkedIn Subscribers

According to GFI Software's just published December 2012 VIPRE Report, the most common malicious campaigns across the Internet during the month were spam sent to PayPal, LinkedIn and Amazon consumers while mobile Trojan malware campaigns camouflaged as Android applications got generated on bogus Google Play websites.

Specifically, malware distribution scams relied on BlackHole exploit toolkit to entice consumers on Amazon and LinkedIn with junk electronic mails that made them un-hesitantly visit malevolent websites. Spammers tried duping LinkedIn members through phony requests that asked them to connect, whereas consumers on Amazon got enticed with fake receipts or confirmations of purchase orders.

Meanwhile, fraudulent e-mails targeted PayPal clients telling that their payment had gone through the necessary processing to obtain an upgrade of Windows 8.

GFI then notes that during the maximum instances, victims became infected with the infamous Cridex worm's variant.

Senior Threat Researcher Christopher Boyd from GFI Software elucidated that cyber-criminals frequently tried designing fake websites and sending out unsolicited e-mails, which seemed genuine, but actually caught end-users unprepared followed with contaminating their computers. Softpedia.com published this dated January 8, 2013.

Boyd further said that throughout 2012, cyber-criminals were observed creating far more persuasive websites with increased ability and those websites victimized end-users who hastened towards supplying "Personally Identifiable Information" alternatively downloading software devoid of fully confirming the source's authenticity. Actually, Boyd suggested, end-users required being additionally cautious over any situation via spending reasonably good time for examining URLs as well as manually accessing the websites sought to visit. Help Net Security published this dated January 8, 2013.

And alongside the above, highlighting the 10 most prevalent e-threats of December 2012, GFI Software published statistics based on which adware was found as the most dominant threat occupying the first 4 positions on the Top Ten List.

Significantly, the ten malicious programs in their descending order were: Trojan.Win32.Generic with 27.12% infections, Trojan.Win32.Sirefef with 3.69%, GamePlayLabs -3.46%, and Wajam with 2.71%. These were all adware programs. Following them, the e-threats ranked were: GameVance at 1.47%, Pinball Corporation at 1.41%, Trojan.Win32.Ramnit.c (v) at 1.16%, BProtector at 1.10%, INF.Autorun (v) at 1.08% and Virus.Win32.Sality.at (v) at 1.07%.

Related article: December Witnesses Higher Number of phishing Attacks

» SPAMfighter News - 1/14/2013