Spammers are misusing well known names on the internet to give deceptive legitimacy to the emails they send, according to Internet Threats Trend Report for Q1 2010 from Commtouch.
Overall, between 5-10% of all spam appears to originate from Gmail accounts. Gmail’s message style, as well as those of PayPal and Facebook, is frequently used by spammers and phishers as standard templates to prompt action by targets of spam or phishing, according to Commtouch.
According to the report, spam levels averaged 83% of all email traffic throughout the quarter, peaking at nearly 92% near the end of March and bottoming out at 75% at the start of the year. On a daily basis, an average of 305,000 zombies were activated to inflict malicious activity. Mal/Bredo malware had 838 variants during the quarter.
The report showed that Pharmacy spam remained in the top spot with 81% of all spam messages, maintaining last quarter’s average, as did the number two topic, replicas, which maintained its average of 5.4%. In the Web 2.0 sphere of user-generated content, entertainment is the most popular topic for blog creators.
Even though Brazil continues to produce the most zombies, its numbers decreased in the first quarter. In Q4 2009, it was responsible for 20.4% of global zombie activity while the number dropped to 14% in Q1 2010.
Asaf Greiner, vice president of products at Commtouch, said: “Spammers and cybercriminals use experimentation to reach their goals. They are always testing new techniques to lure their victims, from using familiar formats and domains to creating entirely new ways to entice action.”
