Posted on 10/18/2007 8:02:29 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report for the third quarter of 2007, based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly.
The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spam such as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites.
According to the report:
Spam with malware hyperlinks inside one technique which reached a new high during the quarter was innocent-appearing spam messages that contained hyperlinks to malware-sites. This type of spam utilizes vast zombie botnets to launch 'drive-by downloads' and evade detection by most anti-virus engines. Several blended spam attacks of this type focused on leisure-time activities, such as sports and video games. Messages invited consumers to download "fun" software such as NFL game-tracking and video games from what appeared to be legitimate websites. Instead, consumers voluntarily downloaded malware onto their computers.
New Spam Tricks
Spammers experimented with several new techniques to slip past anti-spam engines and into inboxes throughout the quarter. For example, they disguised messages in PDF, Excel, and other popular file formats. This simple trick fools many anti-spam technologies and end users alike, whose guards may be down when they see the popular file attachment ending.
More details, including samples of PDF spam and spam messages containing malware, are presented in the report available here
Who the heck buys from anything from anonymous, unsolicited people who cannot even be bothered to use a grammar or spell-check?
I want to meet the people who fall for these emails.
E-mail may be getting phased out by texting. Who wants to plow through 100 emails everyday where 95 are garbage? Plus everyone always has their cell phone, most people are not always on their computer.
About the same as junk mail.
I've never understood how spammers make money. I can't believe that the response rate for these justifies their continuation. I know how cheap it is to flood the world, but still....
My Spamassassin kills off my spam. I occasionally get one that makes it past, but I just mark it, and I never see that kind again.
Of course, I rarely put my email address out on the net.
I have had my bank account wiped out five times by some Nigerian, but the e-mail I got today is a sure thing. I am already counting my millions.
Give them a couple more years. Texting will be just as flooded with spam as email is now.
In the last two months my spam mailbox has exploded with mail. From like 40 a day to 120 a day.
I’ve noticed the number of messages caught has gone up recently as well.
Those things are brutal. OCR technology can't touch them, and they bypass all content checking. The only way I've been able to stop them is using digital signatures from the openprotect.org database with Clam Antivirus(doing this makes my Linux spam filter recognize the attachments as a virus and handles them as such). Even that is a rather crude method, but it's all I've found that will stop such spam attachments so far. We haven't seen as many at our site in the last few weeks. When they were at their peak during midsummer we were catching a few thousand .pdf/Excel spam messages a day. Since then there has been a sharp increase in typical spam from botnets. There were 3 days last week where we were rejecting close to 60,000 messages per day.
Here's our stats over the last month:
I let eHarmony have it the other day. I called them up and they got an earful. They were using a 3rd party “re-mailer” out of Romania (which is where I and spamcop.net were able to trace the header) that had successfully phished an e-dress I use only for special yahoogroups discussions.
For some of us, that just really doesn't work. I've had the same email address for more than 10 years now, and it is apparently autogenerated within milliseconds of someone generating email addresses.
However, my email provider (pobox.com) does a damn good job of filtering mail.
I'd like to initiate the death penalty for both spammers and the morons who buy from them.
Gmail is my friend :)
LOL!... I could not agree with you more!... Some people just should write "moron /stupid," on the foreheads!... No common sense whatsoever.
Buying things from them is just one way they make money. They can also infect your computer with malware that can potentially get accunt info or just screw up your system until you go to a website they direct you to and pay for software to remove the malware. It’s a multi billion dollar criminal enterprise.
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