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Spammers Trying To Camouflage Reputation
Mike Sachoff
Staff Writer
2008-10-15
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Spammers are using new camouflage tactics to cloak their bad reputations to allow malware and unwanted messages to reach inboxes, according to a new report by Commtouch.
 | | Spammers Trying To Camouflage Reputation |  |
Commtouch's third quarter 2008 Email Threats Trend Report is based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly.
The report found that spam levels during the third quarter averaged 77 percent, as in the previous quarter, ranging from a low of 61 percent to a peak of 94 percent of all email.
Legitimate sites and senders were used by spammers to hide their illicit activity, including sites like Microsoft's Live.com.
Over half of zombies/bots change their IP address daily. Germany has the fastest rate of zombie IP address turnover, at approximately 79 percent per day, followed by China at 78 percent turnover per day.
Malware masqueraded as legitimate newsletters such as CNN Daily Top 10 or IE7 Browser updates.
New spam tactics during the quarter included links to Flash (.swf) files, ASCII art spam, and hidden Bayesian poisoning text combined with HTML tricks.
"Internet Service Providers and enterprises are implementing a broad range of filtering tactics, including filtering based on sender reputation, which in turn impact how spammers and malware distributors can reach their goal of penetrating inboxes," said Amir Lev, chief technology officer of Commtouch.
"The growing trend is for spammers to adopt the good reputation built up by other sites and senders in order to bypass reputation-based email filters. They accomplish this in a number of ways, including stealing legitimate email senders' credentials, or compromising email account enrollment processes and automatically registering thousands of free email accounts."
"This puts ISPs in the uncomfortable position of becoming the source of outbound spam rather than just trying to protect their subscribers from receiving spam."
About the Author:
Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.
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