Spammers Begin the New Year with More sophistication

Leading vendor for Web security and messaging services to global businesses, MessageLabs, announced on January 30 2008 the outcomes of its Intelligence Report for January 2008.

According to the report, spammers are increasingly launching financial-related e-mail campaigns like offers for financial products together with phishing attacks like lottery scams, jobs and loans. On the other hand, they are cutting down on popular spamming topics like replica watch and focusing on bargain designer garments and weight loss items in large volumes.

Chief Security Analyst, Mark Sunner, of MessageLabs, said that spammers started off aggressively with the beginning of the New Year 2008. He remarked they are proving to behave more sensitive to time and be increasingly business-oriented than in any of their earlier strategies. EarthTimes.org published this in news on January 30, 2008.

Another result of the MessageLabs Intelligence Report for 2008 shows rise in a new kind of spam called the search engine spam. The security company found that this spam emerged during the early weeks of January 2008, accounting for 17% of total spam the IT security firm detected in January 2008.

The report also tells that MessageLabs found drop in other forms of unsolicited e-mail. Spam promoting stocks fell to 2% in January 2008, a record low since the company began counting.

The company's researchers attributed this decline to police's successful arrest of the well-known spammer Alan Ralsky, who, as per federal prosecutors, carried out a highly strategic pump and dump operation along with ten more people until they were forced to shut it down in the first week of January 2008.

The MessageLabs Intelligence Report for 2008 further says that after analyzing the different spamming techniques in use, MessageLabs found that HTML or text-based spam is used most often. It found that text spam doubled over the second half of 2007, accounting for 60% of total spam against half of that percentage during the summer of 2007.

Also, the image spam has declined to 2% as compared to a high of 20% last summer, according to the findings of MessageLabs' report.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 2/6/2008