Symantec: spammers ever clever with deceptive, themed emails

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 31 January 2012 13:33

Your IT - Home IT

Symantec's latest January 2012 report shows that spammers are being as deceptively clever as ever, 'using holidays and major events to make their mail more appealing', with 1 in every 327.9 Australian emails containing malware.

Today's WWW no longer stands for the wild, wild web - it obviously now stands for the "wilder, wilder web", with spammers, phishers and malware mavens still up to their usual tricks - except with ever more clever subterfuge.

After all, with spamming and malware obviously profitable criminal enterprises, the online bad guys are going to keep on doing what makes the money, even if it is clearly very ill gotten, and can severely impact other people's lives - these bastards just don't care, or spam and malware wouldn't be a problem.

Symantec reports in its latest 'January Symantec Intelligence Report', which is available here in SlideShare format that December 2011 saw global spam levels drop, but 'in January gradually returned to similar levels as in November 2011, which is still lower than the 2011 average.'

Spams unsurprisingly centered around holiday themes and major events, with even the London 2012 Olympics being used to scam people out of their hard earned cash.

Symantec's 'Intelligence' division reports seeing 'more than 10,000 unique domain names compromised with a redirect script written in PHP that contains a reference to the New Year in the file name', with these redirect scripts 'hosted on compromised Web sites and links to these were included in spam emails, which were subsequently blocked by Symantec.cloud.'

Showing just how evil some of these criminals are in 'further enticing recipients to open their messages', Symantec says that 'spammers used additional social engineering techniques by including parametres in the URL to suggest that the destination is a social networking site.'

Next up will be attacks around Valentine's Day, among other 'upcoming calendar events' that should get anyone's 'spidey-sense' tingling ferociously.

Paul Wood, a senior intelligence analyst at Symantec said that: 'We also expect to see plenty of spam and malware taking advantage of some of the major upcoming sporting events this year. We are already seeing references to the Summer Olympics in London as part of 419 or advance fee fraud messages.

'By relating their mails to widely-celebrated holidays and current events with global interest, spammers and malware authors can (at first glance, at least) make their messages more interesting, and increase the chance of recipients visiting spam Web sites or becoming infected,' Wood added.

So'¦ even if you're using Internet Security software, it's clear that people need to be very, very careful when they're reading emails and to certainly think twice before taking up any offers that are probably far too good to be true.

More report highlights are on page two, please read on!