Spam Attacks on Twitter Massive during November 2011: Kaspersky

According to its most recent November 2011 monthly report, Kaspersky Labs states that spammers massively attacked Twitter.com the micro-blogging social networking site during November 2011. Thus, members of Twitter appeared to have hugely spammed invitations asking people to enroll themselves within the social network. The invitations consisted of one sticky text as well as a web-link, which diverted recipients onto one pornography website. Reportedly, a URL-condensing utility registered with the domain name .cn shortened the web-link.

Furthermore, Twitter.com was as well used for registering false notifications during November 2011 although in smaller amounts compared to 2010 summer that had an explosion of the said kind of notifications across the Net. Nevertheless, spammers find them popular even now: whenever the web-link is clicked, users get diverted onto a site serving one Viagra ad as well as malware.

Moreover, alongside Twitter getting attacked with spam campaigns, security researchers at Kaspersky Labs further found that there were many bulk e-mails making phony notifications that were triggered from 'online stores' during November 2011. While no particular store name was utilized in the spam outbreaks, e-mail recipients just found invitations asking to follow a given web-link for examining a reference to an order alternatively, read through an invoice. The web-link, nonetheless, took them onto malware.

Meanwhile, Kaspersky, in its report, discusses phishing as well. According to it (the company's report), phishing e-mails doubled in percentage from among the total e-mail, over October 2011, as well as averaged at 0.02%.

Subsequently, the report reveals major shifts too in the positioning of the ten most phishers-targeted organizations in contrast with that of October 2011. Among the social-networking websites that phishers compromised, Habbo climbed to position No.2, while the same website wasn't even enlisted among the Top Tens during October 2011. During November 2011, there was tenfold increase in the number of assaults against Habbo. Facebook too received increased assaults though slightly and was placed on No.4.

Finally, according to the report, there's been a striking rate of phishing assaults on the Internal Revenue Service by the time 2011 ended, with the theme revolving around the yearly returns filing within USA.

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