Stock Spam Topped Bitdefender’s List of Top Spam for 2007

As per the news published by The BitDefender, counterfeit watches, pornography and drugs were in the top ten spam list in 2007.

Penny stock spam, that made a comeback in last few months, was on top of the ten-spam list. The anti-spam experts have founded that stock spam, mostly, was attachment-based and image attachment dominated the first half of the last year. On the other hand, the second half of 2007 was dominated by "experimental" waves of PDF and mp3 spam. The analysts also said that the last few months of 2007 witnessed the resurgence of obfuscated text-only spam.

After analyzing the heavy flow of spam in 2007, the specialist at BitDefenders said that the same trend would continue in 2008 as well. However, they said that 2008 would see a great variation in the appearance of e-mails, content and target for better returns.

As per the report, phishing didn't cause much harm in 2007 but it's more dangerous because it results in direct loss to users. Usually, cyber crooks use two kinds of phishing spam - either they threat to terminate the bank account which is being phished or ask a user to enter his bank account information to update the security apps.

The analyst said that people need to be very careful while disclosing their personal information on the Internet because the templates used in these e-mail are professionally crafted and look exactly like that of the banks. Hence, it becomes very difficult to distinguish it from original and duplicate templates.

Botnets will continue to flourish in the current year and might pose serious threats as the year progress. The Storm worm, aka Nuwar, created lots of problem in 2007 but this year, new variants of it are likely to come up. A new breed of spam might also get to see in 2008 as the US presidential elections are coming closer.

Bogdan Demit, Chief Technology Officer, BitDefender, stated that with the rapid growth of online shopping, new threats are bound to arise from stock trading, shopping, gaming, social networking and bill payment, as reported by VnuNet on December 24, 2007.

Related article: Stock Spamming On the Rise

» SPAMfighter News - 1/8/2008