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Image Spam Surged 300% In April
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2009-05-07
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Though the Conficker worm threat turned out to be more hype than reality in April, spammers and cybercrooks were still very active in exploiting public interests. Latching on to traditions as well as big news stories provided venue for peddling a morass of trash.
 | | Image Spam Surged 300% In April |  |
The big scare (overblown hype) in April was the swine flu, which spammers were quick to capitalize on by adjusting their campaigns accordingly. It's classic bait and switch, as it is in cases where email recipients were duped into opening emails about the earthquake that rocked Italy, or IRS tax season phishing scams.
Fake Easter e-cards containing links to scareware went out, and the Waledac botnet was used to promote everything from online gambling, fake products, and foot fetishes.
Overall, spam is on the rebound since the famous November takedown of McColo Corp., which resulted in a temporary but drastic reduction in spam. Other reports show spam reaching about 70 percent recovery as spammers regroup.
According to AppRiver's May Spam Report, spam in April was nearly equal to March, which saw the highest spam levels security researchers had seen in months. Though most spam has traditionally originated from Europe, North America, and Asia, South America made a not so laudable appearance last month, spam originating from that continent (20%)nearly reaching that of Asia (22%).
In fact, on a country-by- country basis, Brazil topped everybody in terms of spam output, followed by the United States, Turkey, India, Russia, Poland, Korea, Columbia, Ukraine, and Romania.
Fortunately, the number of viruses contained in spam emails was down significantly last month. Even so, AppRiver says the company's filters captured around eleven million email-borne viruses.
Making the biggest comeback is image spam. Though it seemed it would be difficult to top March-when the amount of image spam was more than January and February combined-image spam surged by 300 percent in April, leading to 610 million blocked messages and consisting over six percent of all spam traffic, the highest level of image spam in over a year.
For more information about the increased use of .png file extensions and examples of phony IRS, Easter, and swine flu emails, check out AppRiver's May Spam Report.
About the Author:
SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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