Organised crime taking over spam - survey
Spam has evolved over the last 12 months, with the overriding trend being the transition of spam from being annoying and indecent to illegal and malicious, according to online security firm Clearswift, which has recently announced the findings of its thirteenth spam index. When the company first began measuring different spam content, it was dominated by an almost even mix of pornography, financial, healthcare and direct product spam. In addition, there were also significant amounts of gambling and scam-related spam. As revenues for spammers continued to push the tide of spam higher, it was financial and pharmaceutical spam that rose the most, now making up 69.6 per cent of spam between them, compared to 39.2 per cnet this time last year. Pornographic spam has fallen from 21.8 per cent to 4.8 per cent in the same period. Now we are far more likely to receive an offer of cheap Viagra or a low interest rate loan than an invitation to an x-rated site or a special deal on replica J-Lo engagement rings. This trend is indicative of the growing sophistication of spammers and the move of criminal activity online. In its early days, spam was dominated by the pornographic industry and entrepreneurial salesmen that were quick to realise its potential as a low cost and unregulated marketing medium. However, organised crime gangs have since been moving their operations online and spam provides a virtually invisible channel for this kind of activity. By using spam to direct e-mail users onto disreputable websites, it is possible to conceal their activity from authorities. spam is now a hotbed for a variety of financial scams, such as phishing and “pump and dump” stock tipping, and serves as a black market for illegal goods such as fake pharmaceuticals and counterfeit software. “Not only does spam cause network congestion and reduce productivity, it is now being used as a channel for a plethora of malicious and illegal activity,” commented Alyn Hockey, director of research at Clearswift. Organised crime gangs now have access to a significant networks of zombie PCs, mainly home PCs with broadband connections, capable of churning out vast quantities of spam. These networks are now being used as a platform for a variety of crimes such as extortion, using the threat of denial of service attacks, and fraudulent identity theft scams, using phishing techniques. The figures, which were extracted from the millions of unsolicited e-mails received by Clearswift on a weekly basis from seed accounts and submissions forwarded to the company by its 20m users.
Reproduced from an article published by Digital Media Europe
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