Peter Dinham
Thursday, 14 May 2009 15:06
Business IT -
Security
Page 1 of 2
Worldwide spam levels in April increased with the swine flu outbreak as spammers continue to use current events to spread their messages around the Internet.
According to Symantec in its latest state of
spam report, health and financial related spam increased six percent
during April, and it found that the top 20 subject lines relating to
the swine flu spam campaign used certain keywords such as Jolie caught
swine flu, Swine flu in NY, Madonna caught swine flu, America against
swine flu, First US swine flu victims and, Be quick! anti-swine flu
drugs are almost sold out.
Symantec says that health related spam samples had been observed with
messages talking about medicines that could be used to fight the flu,
and providing URLs to various pharmacy sites.
It says that, in one example, potential victims were sent an email with
a malicious PDF attachment that promised to answer questions about the
Swine Flu. It detected the malicious PDF file as Bloodhound.Exploit.6
and the dropped malicious file contained in the PDF as InfoStealer.
According to Symantec, while it remains to be seen whether swine flu
spam will result in a swine flu spam pandemic, “history tells us that
current event spam campaigns will continue in an effort to lure victims
and distribute spam messages.”
“It should also be noted that spammers recently used the Italian
earthquake in their messages. As always, users should be careful before
opening any attachments or clicking on URL links.”
Overall, Symantec says spam volumes continue to creep back up to
normal, and are currently sitting at 94 percent of their pre-McColo
levels, adding that spam categories continue to fluctuate month to
month with leisure and Internet spam decreasing eight and seven percent
respectively, and financial spam in-creasing by six percent.
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