Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a copy of an email he received regarding the renewal of a domain name he owned, which was due to expire. Since the information in the email was correct, he clicked on the renewal link provided. At this point he became dubious of the email—and for good reason. As in most cases like this, at first glance you would find it difficult to spot anything out of the ordinary with this type of email and would simply presume that it was a friendly reminder from your ISP to re-register your domain name.
When the link provided in the email is clicked (in order to supposedly renew the domain) it brings you to a site where you are presented with a page like the one shown below. Again, there is nothing really out of the ordinary and all appears nice and professional:
Every day when I walk into work I’m greeted by an avalanche of data on new malware and Internet scams. The numbers in the last few years have been staggering. And when you think about the people behind the numbers it can get quite sad—people who’ve had their computers taken over, been scammed, stolen from, and just plain abused by cyberthiefs. It can get to you. A lot of days I don’t feel so good. Today I feel better. The FBI just announced they will arrest nearly 100 people involved in a phishing scheme.
The FBI calls it Operation Phish Fry. Operation Phish Fry means that someone in the FBI loves a bad pun. But the important thing is it means that a whole bunch of bad guys are going to jail. It’s not going to eliminate all phishing attacks (we detected 55,389 phishing Web site hosts in 2008 alone). But this latest move takes a lot of bad guys off the Internet and...
Overall spam volumes averaged at slightly over 86 percent of all email messages in September 2009, which is a decrease of 4 percent since July 2009. However, it is considerably greater than September 2008 when spam levels averaged at 78 percent of all email.
Notable this month is that the percentage of spam containing malware has increased, reaching up to 4.5 percent of all spam at one point. When compared to August 2009, Symantec has observed a nine-fold increase in spam containing malware during September. With respect to spam categories, the main movers were Internet spam, which increased by 3 percent again this month and averaged at 32 percent of all spam; and financial spam, which decreased 3 percent to account for 17 percent of all spam.
Click here to download the October 2009 State of Spam Report, which highlights the following trends:
