The recent shutdown of a San Jose-based Web hosting company named McColo.com appears to have resulted in a significant short-term drop in spam traffic worldwide. At approximately 21:30 GMT on November 11, 2008, multiple upstream network providers shut down access to McColo.com hosted systems, based on abuse complaints. One of the results of this action was a quick and dramatic decrease in spam sent worldwide.

The volume change could be measured directly in the Symantec probe network, which saw a 65% drop in traffic when comparing the 24 hours prior to the McColo.com shutdown to the 24 hours after. It is interesting that shutting down a single hosting company could have such a large impact on overall spam volume, but when you consider that McColo.com was allegedly hosting a significant number of botnet command-and-control systems, it is not totally surprising. Their IP range has, in the past, been linked with reports of serving up...

While the U.S. voters have now been heard and are welcoming their new president, it is important for us to remember that the spam campaign is certainly not over. Spam levels averaged in at 76.4 percent of all messages in October 2008. This spam level represents a year-on-year increase of nearly six percent since October 2007.

Over the last year, Symantec has been monitoring spam related to the U.S. presidential campaign. It all began 12 months ago when spammers cast their first votes for Republican nominee Ron Paul. With spam subject lines such as “IRS Fears Ron Paul?”, it was certainly an early indication that it was going to be an interesting year for spam related to the presidential campaigns. February 2008 saw a round of bogus links to Hillary Clinton videos that were cloaking a malicious Trojan. This tactic emulated a popular technique being used by spammers to link malicious code and spam. This trend continued in amongst other types of spam...

Symantec has observed an increase in the use of image spam attacks over the past few weeks. Symantec defines image spam as an unsolicited message containing an image in the body.

In August, image spam attacks accounted for approximately 1.6% of total spam. In September we observed that image attacks almost doubled, representing approximately 2.6% of total spam. Over 50% of image attacks observed are English, and the second largest group of messages is Russian. In the first ten days of October, image spam messages have averaged approximately 8.6% of total spam. This is the highest mark to date over the last 90 days. From May of this year up to September, image spam was relatively quiet. As stated above, these numbers have been increasing since mid-September. We have not seen image spam of this volume since February of this year.

Commonly seen image spam messages have included Russian online dating offers, random product offerings with an image opt-out, and the all too...

We have observed a fraudulent spam attack masquerading as an email from Symantec. This email is in Portuguese and contains the Symantec logo and coloring, which make it appear as a legitimate email from Symantec. The “From” line is forged to add further credibility. The “Subject” and “From” lines appear as follows:

Subject:  Security Check
From: SYMANTEC <Worm@bda.267>

Needless to say, this is not from Symantec. The body of the message contains text that indicates that the Symantec Security Check System has tested your computer and found “X” number of dangerous imperfections. The email goes on to say that your computer is infected with the virus “Worm@bda.267.” Users are encouraged to click the provided link to download updates to protect their systems from further damage from this worm. Incidentally, there is no such virus as Worm@bda.267.

If the...