Spammers’ Attacks Now Getting More Organized

As cyber criminals get more professional, their attacks have become increasingly organized, the recent ISTR (Internet Security Report) by Symantec suggests. Symantec is a Cupertino, California-based security firm.

The report said that online miscreants were exploiting households' concerns about the vagaries of the real estate and property market to launch new spam campaigns. These campaigns were being used to steal users' private information by pretending to evaluate them for refinancing a house, or to procure an equity loan, researchers said.

Such illicit efforts were partly responsible for the steep rise in spam mails to 70% of the total e-mail during September 2007, according to Symantec experts. On the one hand, amount increased by only 1% since August 2007, on the other, the spam scenario keeps on having noticeable changes.

For instance, the once common image spam that regularly visited users' inboxes worldwide has been going out of the spammers' preference list, coming down to 7% of total spam during September 2007 from 10% in August 2007. Attackers are also focusing their attention on creating threats specific to regions. As a result, worm attacks in the APJ (Asia Pacific and Japan) region rose to 29% over the period January-June 2007.

The report further indicates that the APJ region had 70% of spam mails out of total e-mail originating there, compared to a global mean of 61%. The study also discovered that in India, 7.4% of spam mails originated during January-June 2007, making a slight decline from 76% over July-December 2006. Further, a majority of the assaults on computers in India were traced to Australia (6%) and the US (88%).

The report further says that individual criminals and organized crime groups are using underground servers to sell fraudulently acquired information, including bank cards, credit cards, identity numbers that government issues, PINs or Personal Identification Numbers, lists of e-mail addresses and user accounts.

With respect to popular browsers, Microsoft's Internet Explorer had the largest number of flaws at 39, with Mozilla's Firefox following closely at 34. It also came into light that attacks through e-mail attachments were the first preference of cyber criminals that estimated at 46% of global attacks.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 11/1/2007