Online Threat Trend: Looks can be Deceptive
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Apr 29, 2008

Cyberoam, in collaboration with Commtouch, has released its Q1 2008 email threat trend report. According to the study, legitimate-appearing websites and messages may cloak malware and spams.

Some new tactics used by spammers include pharma spam camouflaged as Hotmail welcome letters, blogspot redirects to malware sites, hidden malware sites in search result URLs, hosted spam images on Flickr accounts, and spear-phishing scams using Google and Yahoo! Calendar standards.

All of these methods deploy social and psychological engineering strategies to take advantage of user trust and behavior. On average, more than 350,000 zombies were newly activated each day to facilitate this activity.

Social engineering approaches targeting user behavior patterns had also seen a steep rise during Q4 2007, where spammers launched attacks deploying easy cash and discounted gift scams. Existing security solutions have been unable to block the new formats, resulting in an alarming rise in spam levels reaching 94% of all email at its peak to date in 2008.

The report also revealed holidays continued to be a vehicle for spam, with outbreaks in honor of Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, and April Fool's Day. Most anti-spam solutions were ineffective, as blocking emails leveraging holiday-themed keywords often resulted in false positives.


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