Davey Winder
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 05:11
Business IT -
Security
Page 3 of 4
The reason, and again this should come as no surprise, is
revealed by Guy Roberts, director of the McAfee Avert Labs EMEA, who
told us:
“Many of our participants noticed that their
computers were slowing down, this means that while they were surfing,
unbeknownst to them, Web sites were installing malware. The fact that
in just 30 days they commented on a noticeable change in the power of
their computers proves just how much malware is being installed without
innocent people’s knowledge. Spam is most definitely much more than a
nuisance; it’s a very real and fast-growing threat.”
Perhaps the most interesting result, though, of the experiment is the
shift away from scattergun tactics to targeted spam distribution
campaigns. Foreign language and social engineering spam accounted for
more than the anticipated volume of emails it seems. France and Germany
were the two countries that received the most foreign language spam
with 11 percent and 14 percent respectively, something which McAfee
expects to increase substantially across the globe in the future.
Nick Kelly, a McAfee Avert Labs Analyst, says:
“If we’d have done this experiment two years ago, I would have expected
a very small percentage of the spam to be written in a foreign
language, if any at all. Although this is a small percentage of the
overall spam, it’s something we expect to grow and grow.”
When it comes to the actual subject matter of spam, then the double
whammy of finance and advertising comes out on top. Yeah, I know, to be
expected. The ongoing credit crunch just making it even more inevitable
that spammers will draw upon a combination of greed and poverty to pull
the punters in.
If finance and advertising topped the subject matter chart, what were the other popular spam categories? Read on to find out...
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