Twitter phishing hit, as spam infiltrates 90% of all emails

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 11 June 2009 14:03

Business IT - Security

Spam levels climbed to nearly 90 percent of all email last month with some worrying new trends emerging, like the booming Twitter site being used as bait to phish for information.

Symantec reports that, while the McColo shutdown is all but a distant memory, old botnets have been brought back online, along with the creation of new botnets.

The latest report from Symantec on spam activity around the world, also reveals that the European, Middle East and Asian region (EMEA) continues to be the leading host of zombie computers, although Brazil – at 16 percent – “owns the dubious honour of the number one host of active zombie machines.”

There’s also one right out of left-field, with these spam jockeys driving the appeal to public sentiment to supposedly help out the US auto companies faced with huge financial problems and bankruptcy.

Symantec also observed several interesting trends emerging in May, in particular the re-emergence of image spam, with the consequential, significant increase in message size.

According to Symantec, image spam has re-emerged as a force to be reckoned with, as 6.5 percent of all spam messages in May containing an image, even climbing in one week to 21.9 percent of all messages. As well, the average size of spam messages increased, with 24.14 percent of messages in the 2kb-5kb bucket, and 14 percent of messages larger than 10kb.

“When you consider that less than three percent of messages were larger than 10kb in January 2009 this increase in message size is significant, with the increase putting a strain on mail infrastructures and could possibly prevent end users from receiving legitimate email.”

CONTINUED page 2