Spam E-mail Attacking Function at a Success Rate of One Percent

Security vendor 'McAfee' announced at its 'Focus 2010 Conference', Las Vegas, in the second week of October 2010 that cybercrimes have increased drastically. Dave Marcus, Firm's Director of Security Research and Communications stated that usual mass spam e-mail attacks operate about a rate of 1%, as reported by v3 on October 15, 2010.

This indicates that merely one in 100 netizens are likely to click the infected links enclosed in their e-mails. These links can install malware or computer viruses to the user's system, with the purpose of making financial gains for the cybercrooks.

According to Marcus, cybercriminals can greatly enhance their success rate by means of open-source intelligence, which is an openly available data from social networking websites.

Further, he stated that no code is required to be written.

Marcus highlighted the fact that in Web 2.0, users are publicly sharing information in a non-solicited manner.

To prove his point, Marcus said that he followed a Twitter who was traveling Arlington National Cemetery, and was posting pictures of his voyage. As the users had enabled the feature of location information display, Marcus was, all through; able to follow the man's route as he went to home, tweeting during the journey, and even identified his residence.

Marcus then messaged the Twitter user, commenting him on the pictures, and embedded a link that purportedly directed to another sight of one of the tombs. He noticed that the users spontaneously clicked on the link. Had Marcus been a hacker, this user's system would have been hacked.

Besides, Marcus followed users' daily travels by means of the geo-location of their tweets, documenting their schedules, where they worked, shopped or stayed. He pointed that this information is very helpful for marketers and equally important to cybercrooks. From the information they collect, they can design messages including infected links that are sure to grab the users' attention and generate clicks.

According to Marcus users need to be aware of the fact that social networking can be exploited to compromise systems. Users need to understand the fact that their information will not remain private, as reported by itworldcanada on October 15, 2010.

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» SPAMfighter News - 10/23/2010