Spam Propagates Faster from Hacked E-mail, Find Researchers

According to researchers, junk e-mails propagate faster if they're distributed from compromised or what can be hacked electronic mail accounts, so published digit.in, November 28, 2014.

Security investigators Kathleen Carley and Ghita Mezzour belonging to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA situated Carnegie Mellon University conducted a research, which was released within the International Journal of Security and Networks, to show spam propagation in its varied dynamics. They indicated hacked accounts as being largely confrontational while distributing spam that malware produced automatically, compared to spam that got distributed from individual accounts. Since hacked accounts are more hostile, their activity resulted in spam to disseminate as well as reach a greater number of users faster.

The researchers state that hacked accounts reveal a tendency towards dispatching junk e-mails more aggressively for one reason- intentional, individually spread e-mail junk gets done manually while in the case of hacked spam, malware is used that automatically generates the spam.

Conventionally, spam carried advertisements to promote counterfeit/fake items, whereas currently there are political information and unruly rumors too in spam messages.

The study finds that junk e-mails arriving from any familiar electronic mail id is frequently more credible instead if they arrived from a scandalous else unidentifiable source. Sometimes receivers of the spam mails mistake their stuff to be authentic and so pass them onto their friends' ids. Further, when sometimes malware gets utilized for hacking accounts, the con artists successfully guess passwords thus becoming capable of utilizing those accounts as hosts to dispatch huge volumes of spam.

Subsequently, if spam is dispatched again-and-again as also forcibly to someone's mailbox it's just like word-of-mouth over the Internet and thus it spreads further.

Mezzour says that it's therefore important to understand these spam-generating accounts and simultaneously model their activities' impact for minimizing spam as well as assaults against social-networking websites. Tech.firstpost.com published this, November 27, 2014.

Hence, according to the experts, the best way for mitigating spam is to deploy spam-filtering software along with anti-malware programs onto users' PCs that would prevent both spam and malware disrupting the systems. Additionally, passwords created should be tough enough to stop easy guesses and cracking by the cyber-criminals.

» SPAMfighter News - 12/4/2014