|
Monday, 10 March 2008 |
Junk e-mail merchants’
US
presidential race scams…
As the
US
presidential race heats up, unwanted and malicious spam e-mails purporting to come from the candidates are on the rise. So says anti-virus, Internet security and anti-spyware specialist Symantec in its ‘The State of
Spam
: A Monthly Report March 2008’.
In October 2007 Ron Paul emerged as the first candidate name spammers tried to exploit. Paul was then followed last month by the first of the presidential frontrunners, when spammers began to circulate bogus links to Hillary Clinton videos cloaking a malicious Trojan. Since then, URLs containing Hillary Clinton’s name have also been used in pornography and Viagra spam (ummn, tasty). Now, says Symantec, spammers have moved on to the remaining frontrunners. One spammer has ‘cast a vote’ for Mike Huckabee, and Barack Obama and John McCain have had their names linked with a ‘portable de-wrinkle machine’ spam, medications spam, and get-rich-quick spam messages.
As well as posing as political figures, spammers are attempting to exploit ‘celebrity’ names – including Michael Jackson and Heather Mills - to circulate bogus, and often malicious, links to videos.
Symantec’s report estimates that overall spam volume stabilised in February for the second month in a row at 78.5% of all e-mail: this was up from a 61% average for the first half of 2007.
Also taking the pulse of the spam industry – this time solely from the enterprise perspective - is search engine giant Google, owner since mid-2007 of communications security and compliance specialist Postini. In its ‘2008 Annual Google Communications Intelligence Report’ Google says electronic communications - e-mail, web, and instant messaging (IM) - continued to grow significantly in 2007, accompanied by a corresponding rise in the volume of spam. Based on data from Postini’s data centres spam volume per user was up 57% in 2007 over 2006.What does this mean in real terms? It means that the average unprotected user would have received 36,000 spam messages in 2007, compared with 23,000 spam messages in 2006. Gooogle reckons Spam was - and still is - the top communication security issue facing companies.
John Williamson |
