Australia fourth on spam league table

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 27 May 2009 09:50

Business IT - Security

“Each hyperlink pointed to a different active profile on one of a number of major social networking environments. The profiles were likely created using random names and automated CAPTCHA-breaking tools. Moreover, the emails were sent from valid webmail hosting providers, which means they were not spoofed, as has been the case in the past for these types of domains.”

Further, Wood reveals that, as spam levels continue to increase, MessageLabs’ analysts are seeing existing attack techniques combine and morph into one.

“In 2008 CAPTCHA-breaking, social networking spam and the use of webmail for spamming all became popular tactics. Today, the bad guys are using the three together as a triple threat to heighten the effectiveness of their spamming.”

On the issue of geographic location of those Internet users receiving spam – which, of course, is pretty much any and everyone who surfs the net - MessageLabs reveals that, according to research conducted over a seven day period, analysis highlights that US residents see spam peak between 9 and 10 a.m. local time and a drop overnight while Europeans are more likely to receive a steady stream of spam throughout the workday.

And, those of us in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, start their day with an inbox full of spam and see less trickling in throughout the day.

“These patterns suggest that spammers are more active during the US working day,” Wood says, adding that “this could be because most active spammers are based in the US, according to data from Spamhaus, or because this is when the spammers’ largest target audience is online and likely to respond.”

The MessageLabs report says that image spam continued into May with Russian language “ransom-style” spam, which the firm says is “reminiscent of traditional ransom messages constructed from letters cut out of newspapers.”

“The content appears to read like a ransom message and is constructed from Russian characters taken from different font styles, however the subject line itself is unrelated translating into, ‘how to attract customers’.”

According to Wood, the use of the Russian language character set has become more popular in recent spam runs where the Russian character set is used to hide the English language content, a spamming technique deployed to avoid content folders.