Archive for October, 2008
More than one in every 400 emails sent between July and September this year was a malicious spam message. The figure for the previous 3 months, April to June, was a little over one in every 3,300 revealing a staggering sharp rise in spamware.
Malicious spam emails are a scary concept as we wrote in our Antivirus Aids Spam Fight article less than two weeks ago. This is where spam messages are laden with attachments carrying Trojans and viruses attempting to infect your computer. If they succeed (by getting past your antivirus defences and convincing you to open them) they turn your computer into a spam zombie which then sends more spam on behalf of the spammer. That’s if you’re lucky. Some malicious spam messages will infect your computer and attempt to steal your private data, including credit card and online banking details. Others will steal other personal information which can be used to forge your identity.
The reason for the steep rise in malicious spam levels is because of a recent spate of malicious spam emails. Specifically, two big malware spam attacks earlier this year, the Penguin Panic Trojan (responsible for 27% of malicious spam) and the Win32/Haxdoor Trojan (responsible for 12% of malicious spam), caused huge surges in the numbers of spamware blocked. This also represents a significant change in direction for spammers as spamware had previously almost exclusively attempted to zombify computers to use them in the propagation of spam. With the Penguin Panic Trojan attacking iPhones, evidence suggests that spammers are changing tact and looking for new platforms to exploit, including social networking communities like Facebook.
Most spam is still being produced in the USA (almost 20%), with the usual suspects of China, Brazil, Russia, India, Italy, Argentina, Italy, South Korea, Turkey and now Thailand and Columbia also sending significant amounts of spam.
Following the FTC and New Zealand government’s successful indictment of the HerbalKing spam ring on 14th October, it appears that there has been no discernible reduction in the mount of spam being filtered by leading Internet anti spam filtering services.
Anti spam filtering services and anti virus services report that their filters continue to stop the same levels of spam as before the indictment, suggesting that simply prosecuting so called spam gangs alone, is not an effective solution.It may be that the continuation of spam levels may be as a result of the tens of thousands of HerbalKing zombied computers on the Internet being configured to send their queue of spam messages regardless of whether the HerbalKing servers are running or not.
If this is the case, we may possibly see a resulting reduction in spam levels in due course as theses zombies are either patched with anti virus tools or exhaust their existing spam message queues. As we have said before, we will continue to monitor this story and post updates here.
Spam Prevention Tips #6
Just don’t do it. Ever. There is nothing to be gained from responding to spam email at all. By now, most of us know that spammers speculate when they send us spam, by guessing thousands of email addresses. Most of the spam they send ends up nowhere as they are addressed to mailboxes that don’t exist or are stopped by anti spam filters. However, when spam messages do get the past spam blocker, and does get through to our mailboxes, one of the most surefire ways to confirm to spammers that they have found a live email account, is to send them a reply of any sort.
So don’t reply advising them that they must have got the wrong address (they didn’t) and definitely don’t try to unsubscribe from their fake email list. These actions will just get you more spam as the only thing it does is confirm your address is live. The spammers will then sell this information to other spammers at a premium, and you’ll find that more of their spam heads your way.
So does that mean you should never unsubscribe from email lists? Well, no. We’re just saying that if you don’t remember signing up for that particular newsletter then, chances are you didn’t. It’s another trick of spammers and anti spam agencies have been advising email users about this for many years. The best thing you can do with spam is just delete it. Better if you can delete it without even opening the message. Better still is to tag it as spam if your email programme supports this. Doing so tells the anti spam software that the message is spam and trains it to better detect it as spam the next time it arrives
In anti spam circles, we’re happy that backscatter is now on the mainstream agenda, having made the USA Today Money section. We are, however, more than disappointed that it has been labelled a “latest fad” and that Jon Swartz goes on to incorrectly imply that users receiving backscatter must have been infected with a spamware virus at some point in the past.
The truth is that anybody can receive backscatter because spambots often forge the senders address in messages they send. If a spambot on your computer sent a message to an address (which does not exist) and forged my address as the sender, I will receive the bounceback. Naturally, I would also be scratching my head as I struggle to recall sending a message to somebody I don’t know offering to sell them an authentic Rolex watch I don’t have. And at a mere $200!
Our spam filter service and other spam blocker services of any merit are already stopping backscatter reaching end user mailboxes. If you are experiencing problems managing your anti spam solution, or if it is not sufficiently filtering backscatter, consider a free 14 day trial of our service.
Al Iverson and Terry Zink have been writing about backscatter for years. See the Al Iverson article for an excellent definition of backscatter.
Anti spam blockers continue to filter out spam from the front-line, their objective being to prevent spam from unknown baddies getting into our inboxes. However, according to internationally respected research firm Gartner Group, 30% of the email we receive is occupational spam sent internally by our own colleagues, the rotten scoundrels! Thankfully, it seems that occupational spam can be reduced or eradicated quite easily with the right education.
Apparently we all receive several unnecessarily CC, BCC and Reply-To-All messages at work each day which significantly cuts down our productivity. These, coupled with the equally unnecessary “thanks for that” and “no problem, anytime” responses to replies, can quickly add up to several hours a month in wasted time processing them.
In his article, Email Hell for Forbes, Ross Mayfield, writes that Basex Research calculates these interruptions are costing industry up to $650 billion each year in lost productivity. They also estimate that the average corporate employee will send and receive a staggering 228 email messages per day by 2010.
Mayfield suggests that businesses can reduce this email overload by transferring some of the need for these messages to be transmitted via email very easily. Companies can post the replies to questions on their blog or use Web 2.0 interactivity to publish and distribute answers preemptively.Of course, this is not going to be suitable for every type of situation, but can encourage companies to look at new approaches to communication.
As unsolicited email spam continues to tangle with spam filters and anti spam blockers, perhaps the first thing we can all do at work, is think twice before spamming our colleagues, clients and suppliers with unnecessary messages. Ross Mayfield’s Email Hell article suggests various additional approaches businesses can take and makes interesting reading.