Spammers get business savvy

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Spammers are becoming more business savvy, targeting many more popular areas of the internet in 2008, a new security report out today has found.

The results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for January 2008 revealed news headlines, New Year offers and weight loss programmes were among the subjects used to entrap unwary users, where 20.3 per cent of all web-based malware intercepted was new.

The security firm also found many countries suffered a rise in spam levels after the holidays, identified as an average of 1,068 new sites per day harbouring malware and other potentially unwanted programs such as spyware and adware.

Mark Sunner, MessageLabs' chief security analyst, said: "Spammers are proving to be more business-minded and time sensitive than ever in their strategies, seeking to exploit the most common and current weaknesses. Unfortunately every month of the year provides the spammers with a newly vulnerable group to target."

The report also highlights the latest trend in search engine spam as a form of attack that's on the rise. Accounting for 17 per cent of spam this month, it typically uses Google and Yahoo engines to redirect searches to fake sites.

This technique allows the spammer to embed a link constructed from a search engine query within an email message. When activated, the link resolves to the spammer's forged website.

The firm said this makes it harder for traditional anti-spam products to detect because while they may recognise known spam sites in links, they can't block links to legitimate search engines like Google or Yahoo.

But more familiar forms of spam did not follow suit. "In light of the financial market volatility, one may have expected stock spam to also rise," Sunner said. But following the indictment of Alan Ralsky, the most prolific stock spammer, Sunner said stock spam levels fell to their all-time lowest at less than two per cent of all spam.

The report found the majority of spam is now made up of text-only or HTML spam. Text spam has doubled in the past six months and now accounts for around 60 per cent of spam compared with approximately 30 per cent last summer.

Some types of spam, like image spam, have declined. Image spam now accounts for approximately two per cent of spam, compared with a peak of 20 percent in the summer of 2007. And HTML spam now accounts for almost 38 percent of all spam, compared with 50 percent last summer.

Meanwhile, the US remains the dominant source of spam, with spam originating from the US accounting for 36.6 percent of all spam sent in January.

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