Davey Winder
Saturday, 28 June 2008 20:32
Business IT -
Security
Page 1 of 2
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:
-
Drugs
-
Replica Watches
-
Phishing (tool for)
-
Pirated Software
-
Pornography
-
Loans
-
Hire & Employment
-
Trojan Viruses Spread (tool for)
-
Dating
-
Diploma
And what about the top ten list of counterfeit business identities? Read on to find out...
CONTINUED