MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ca. – In Symantec Corp.’s January 2008 spam report, the security company noted the rise of holiday spam, spammers getting honest and spammers targeting blogs as key trends observed as 2007 came to a close.

According to Doug Bowers, senior director of engineering with Symantec, what was interesting as 2007 ended what that spam surged and accounted for 75 per cent of all e-mail but climbed up to 83 per cent in the last few days leading up Christmas.

“As expected, a fair number of attacks [were] trying to play off the holiday season,” said Bowers.

During the holiday season, spammers did modify their URLs with holiday-related keywords and phrases to give them a more seasonal appeal. Bowers cited Christmas Viagra as an example.

“It highlights the fact that you can try and link anything up with a holiday so people will click through and spend money,” Bowers said.

Another highlight of the report includes the continued prevalence of phishing and scam e-mails, which was up 16 per cent from seven per cent over the same time period a year ago.

“These are tactics [spammers] are having success with . . . in getting personal information [and] defrauding end users. The fact that they are on the increase tells us that people are still falling for phishing attacks in enough numbers that spammer are able to make money.”

Another tactic that the January 2008 spam report noted was that spammers were “getting honest.”

Spammers tried a new twist on an old scam, falsely promising restitution of $100,000 for past victims of 419 spammers — 419 spammers are e-mail scams from someone that says they’ve come into large sums of money and asks the victim to send personal information so they can help move that money to the proper location and the victim would then get a large sum of money in return for their trouble.

“It hits people who have fallen previously [to 419 scams] in hopes to get them to fall for this second scam,” said Bowers.

As well, the report noted the prevalence of spam around the New Year that asked people to download a song, but which instead downloaded malicious software that caused a computer to be infected and join a bot network that contributes to sending out more spam.

Additionally, the report is warning people about spammers that are using blogs.

Bowers explained that spammers post content on a product that they promoting or a link to a site they want people to visit on a legitimate blog.

“The reason they do that is they can potentially trick an anti-spam filter that is relying on blocking known bad websites so in this case a legitimate blog site is linking back to a site that is being used to promote a specific product.”

He added the best defense for the spam indicated in the report is to have an up-to-date anti-spam solution to prevent these spams from reaching inboxes in the first place and also stay aware of all the potential spam attacks that are out there by reading reports such as Symantec’s.

This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnecIT

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