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 packages could not handle the onslaught ?Image spam has reduced because security companies started dealing with this in two ways. One, they used optical character recognition technique to extend text and ran anti-spam technology. They have also started observing patterns in headers of the spam to indicate whether the mail was spam or not,? explains Prabhat Singh.
Last month saw spammers using holidays and high-profile events as the bait to lure victims. Some of the prominent ones on security firms? radars are:
Valentine?s spam: Romantics who had not bought gifts for their loved ones till February beginning were lured with links, which when clicked on flashed message ?We?re sorry. The offer is not available in your area.? The message then gets redirected to another phishing site. Spammers had even localised their content, with users in India being redirected to a friends networking site while those in Europe and some parts of Asia were redirected to a dating site and in North America to a bonus offer site
IRS spam: Honest US citizens should be wary this tax season with a new IRS phishing currently in circulation. The official looking message which appears to be from IRS and seems to bear the logo of the US treasury department explains that a tax refund is due to the recipient. It then encourages users to click on a URL to get their refund online and asks for users? personal information, which can be used by spammers. Other type of new spam campaigns include vitamins promising to improve your genetics; Russian pornographic services requiring the user to SMS them to continue being spammed with the images (and pay a hefty fee in the process) and cheap fast visas for European countries like Poland.