Click here for a cyber attack

Pragati Verma
Posted: Monday, Feb 25, 2008 at 2355 hrs IST
Updated: Monday, Feb 25, 2008 at 0015 hrs IST

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: Junk mail in your inbox is getting short but not sweet. Even as the average spam (unwanted email) size is falling, you might still have to waste a lot of time in deleting unwanted mails. Shrinking size is simply because of heavy, pipeline clogging image spam losing out in favour of text links that can take you to malicious sites. Latest landmines are phony search string links in the message field, appearing to be Google searches but, when clicked, take the user to a fraud site.

Attackers are getting more sophisticated and elusive—finding ways to get their sites at the top of the Google pages; capitalising on festivals and tax season and sending huge amount of spam out of Europe, according to the latest research from Symantec. Having accounted for about half of all spam in January 2007, image spam has subsequently fallen to less than 8% of total spam in January 2008.

The threats get even deadlier as spammers get more business savvy and capitalise on news and seasonal trends in a more commercial way. “We are seeing an 18-20% spike in spam mail during festivals like Christmas, Valentine and Diwali,” confirms Symantec India director (security response), Prabhat Kumar Singh. Current hot subject lines include Valentine day related spam and tax-time spam.

Equally tricky are Google’s search operators, being used by spammers’ for their own means. Last month, spam domain was directly introduced into the search string. The URL provided in the spam mail looks like a search string but when clicked upon, it opens up the spam domain mentioned at the end of the URL rather than opening any search results. The attack marks a new level of sophistication using multiple techniques to raise site visibility in search results and deliver malware to a mass audience. Good news, if any, is that spam is less likely to clog your pipeline. Spam comprised about 78.5% of all email traffic during January, excluding spam blocked at the gateway by filters. Size has shrunk simply because spammers are moving away from large filesize, pipeline clogging mails with image attachments. Only 5% of spam messages between November 2007 and January 2008 fall in the 10KB-50 KB size (size of 84% of image spam). Now the majority of mails (64%) are 2-5 KB in size. This type of spam became popular among malicious spammers at the end of 2006, as most software...

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