Posted on behalf of Mathew Nisbet, Malware Data Analyst, Symantec Hosted Services
Normally in the run-up to any popular event we would expect to see a flurry of spam subjects and themes using that event. It happens all the time around events like Christmas, the olympics, and so on. One such event that is extremely popular in many parts of the world is St. Patrick's day, so naturally we expected to see an increase in the amount of spam using the subject of the upcoming St. Patrick's day celebrations to try and get people's attention.
However we were surprised to find that this time, the rise of related subjects just hasn't happened! There are of course still some spam appearing on the theme of St. Patrick's day, but for the most part these seem to be the same old generic pharmaceutical spam mails with a themed subject line. All of them together made up 0.003% of spam on the 16th March. So far on the 17th (St. Patrick's day itself) these themed mails have made up only 0.001% of spam.
Some of the subject lines we've seen are below:
St. Patrick''s day
Celebrate St. Patrick''s Day!
Ready for St. Patrick''s Day?
Happy St. Patrick''s Day!
This following example was sent by the Rustock botnet. As you can see, there's nothing in there that is any different to what you might expect to see in any other random spam on any other day.
After the interest spammers showed in St. Patrick's day 2009, we were expecting much more of a surge of related spam to show up, but it has surprisingly been a bit of a non-event. Maybe the spammers didn't get much return for their efforts on this event last year, as everyone was out drinking in celebration, rather than checking their e-mail? Maybe the spammers themselves decided to join in the festivities instead of updating their templates?
Whatever the reason is for this particular washout, we expect it to be an exception rather than a rule, and expect to see spammers continuing to exploit major events as much as they can.