Global spam trends reveal a taste for text, drugs and eBay

By Davey Winder
Saturday, 28 June 2008 19:32

Security

An in-depth survey of the state of spam for the first half of 2008 reveals that spammers have re-discovered a love for the written word. They still rather like drugs and ebay as well...

From January through June 2008, Data security specialist BitDefender says, the kind of stock spam that was once so prolific actually dropped from 25 percent to just 2 percent. During the same period, the also formerly hugely intrusive image spam continued to decline rapidly. How rapidly? How does dropping like a stone from 60 percent to just 3 percent grab you?

BitDefender has also seen that PDF attachment spam, as well as audio and video spam, has dramatically dropped in popularity. Now the attachment spam variations account for just 10 percent or so of email threats by volume.

In the face of this, good old-fashioned text based spam is on the up. In the same period last year BitDefender saw just a 20 percent volume of purely textual spam. This year that figure has grown to 70 percent.

"Plain text continues to be the most prolific medium for e-mail spam distribution, especially due to its simplicity, reduced size and extreme versatility" said Andra Miloiu, BitDefender Spam Analyst.

Indeed, there are other reasons that text spam maintains an appeal, and these become apparent when you start talking about automated scripts for word scrambling, rephrasing or (synonymic) substitution. Image spam, meanwhile, would usually deploy obfuscated content.

The Top 10 list for the first half of 2008 most advocated content through e-mail spam includes:

1. Drugs
2. Replica Watches
3. Phishing (tool for)
4. Pirated Software
5. Pornography
6. Loans
7. Hire & Employment
8. Trojan Viruses Spread (tool for)
9. Dating
10. Diploma

And what about the top ten list of counterfeit business identities? Read on to find out...

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