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Spammers Didn’t Switch their Tactics during Q1-2011

As per the Kaspersky Labs' first quarterly report for 2011,cybercriminals did not much make use of new techniques for spam circulation and used the same conventional tactics during the first quarter of 2011.

One of the most well admired techniques, as per Kaspersky, was to dispatch links to a video clip promoting spammer services, another tactic observed was dispatching e-mails that says "Stop sending me spam" supposedly authored by an annoyed receiver of spam. The e-mail was actually a spam in itself with a video link directing the reader to a spammer's website.

Spammers also exploited the Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster to dispatch spam e-mails capitalizing on these events and persuading victims to pay cash for false donations and fake relief funds.

Besides spam, the latest report notifies regarding malware. During Q1- 2011, Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen sustained its top rank in the Top 10 list of malicious programs circulated through e-mail traffic. This Trojan makes use of spoofing technology and emerges in the appearance of an HTML webpage. The report highlights that, it appears with a phishing e-mail including a video link to a bogus website similar to that of a famous bank or e-pay system, where the user is requested to furnish a login as well as a password.

The report further stated that, the other leading entry in the Top 10 most malicious programs was an e-mail worm family that collects e-mail ids and circulate them through e-mail traffic.

Finally, Kaspersky's recent report also highlighted phishing statistics observed by the company during the first quarter of 2011. The amount of phishing e-mails was quite small and accounted for just 0.03% of the total e-mail traffic. The firm highlighted that, PayPal and eBay remained in the objectionable position of being the companies most regularly attacked by the phishers.

Commenting on the matter, Maria Namestnikova, Senior Spam Analyst at Kaspersky Lab, stated that, remarkably during Q1-2011 Google services, such as Google Checkout and Google AdWords were less taregted. The phishers shifted their focus to the extremely famous Brazilian social networking website, Orkut ( owned by Google), as reported by Techzone360 on May 13, 2011. She further stated that, it is worth pointing out that accounts of the users related to Google's services, including Orkut, are interlinked. Therefore, having got credentials for any one of these accounts, a phisher can avail any Google service registered with the similar user.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 5/26/2011

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