Spam and Phishing Landscape: August 2009

While overall spam volumes averaged 89 percent of all email messages in July 2009, spam volumes continue to fluctuate. During July 2009 image spam continued to have an impact, reaching 17 percent of all spam during one point in July. Health spam decreased by 17 percent, while product and 419 spam both saw increases of eight and three percent, respectively, month over month. Similar to tabloid magazines, spammers continue to have a fascination about certain celebrities such as President Obama, Michael Jackson, and Emma Watson (from the Harry Potter franchise)—they all featured in spam attacks in July 2009.
 
Click here to download the August 2009 State of Spam Report, which highlights the following trends:
 
·         Spammer’s Opinion Poll: President Obama and Michael Jackson
·         Spammers Cast Their Spells to Produce Harry Potter Spam
·         July 2009: Spam Subject Line Analysis
·         Spying Can Be Dangerous
·         Scammers Try to Sneak In Unvoiced Using Voice over IP Services
 
In addition, the August 2009 State of Phishing Report has also been made available here, which highlights the following trends:
 
·         Symantec observed a 52 percent increase from the previous month in all phishing attacks
·         63 percent of phishing URLs were generated using phishing toolkits, an increase of 150 percent from the previous month
·         More than 130 Web hosting services were used, which accounted for six percent of all phishing attacks; a decrease of 14 percent of total Web host URLs when compared to the previous month.
·         There was a 17 percent decrease from the previous month in non-English phishing sites
·         Symantec observed an increase in attacks employing fraudulent use of hijacked legitimate SSL certificates