Social engineering was the driving forcebehind spammers during the month of February. While overall spam volumehovered steadily at 78.5% of email and tactics remained relatively thesame, the use of events, big brands, and public figures drove spamcampaigns during the month. The March State of Spam report highlights several of these.
With the U.S. presidential elections just around the corner thecandidates have turned their focus on each other, just as spammers havefocused their campaigns on the candidates. The first example of thiswas spam leveraging Ron Paul back in October of 2007. Last month,spammers began to spread bogus links purporting to show a HillaryClinton speech, but in actuality the links were cloaking a maliciousTrojan. Most recently we’ve seen spammers leveraging the last remainingfront-runners of the 2008 presidential elections; Obama, McCain, andHuckabee. Just what are spammers linking the candidates with?Everything from Viagra, porn, get-rich-quick schemes, and portabledewrinkle machines.
The presidential candidates aren’t the only targets. Also seen werehigh profile names such as Michael Jackson, Heather Mills, and IndianaJones to name a few. Spammers are using these names to spread maliciouslinks to videos and the names being circulated are all currently highprofile. Who hasn’t heard of the McCartney/Mills divorce or BritneySpears’ woes? The spammer is banking that you want to know more aboutthese celebrities and are therefore leveraging their names to tempt youinto opening the malicious link. These are fairly easy to spot becausein most cases the names are misspelled. I wonder what Paul McCartneywould think of his name more closely resembling a martini (Maccartni)?
In addition to the above the March State of Spam report includes aregional highlight on the Asia-Pacific/Japan region (APJ). The reportoffers a close look at trends in the categories of spam seen as well assome interesting attacks targeting the region. Some of these highlightsinclude:
• Health spam, which includes pharmaceuticals, medical treatments, andherbal remedies, currently makes up 38% of all spam in APJ—that’s awhopping 30% increase since November 2007 when the figures were lastreported. Contrast this with the global percentage of health spam whichis only 12%.
• The Internet and product categories in APJ also differ significantlyfrom the global percentages. Internet spam makes up 13% in APJ comparedwith 23% globally and product spam makes up 15% in APJ compared with26% globally.
• Financial spam has nosedived by 26% from November 2007 and now stands at 7%.
• High profile tactics involved the Chinese New Year snow storms, theEdison Chen sex scandal, and the Chinese version of the pump-and-dumpstock scam.
To read more about the state of spam for March, to view previousmonthly reports, or for additional resources on the current spamlandscape, please visit Symantec’s State of Spam site.