Today's Security Fix

Spammers don’t take the summer off

Spam levels are climbing again, as spammers ramp up efforts to clog inboxes and lure e-mail users into giving up personal or financial information.

According to Google’s Enterprise Blog, there was 53 percent more spam during the second quarter of 2009 than in the first quarter, and 6 percent more than during the same quarter last year. Google collects spam data from its Google mail security services, which uses Postini filters.

Summer has proven to be a busy time for spammers in the past. In the summer of 2006 spammers began sending image spam, messages with text embedded in an image file that evade spam filters that weren’t able to recognize the words inside the image. Most spam filters have since been updated to catch image spam, although Google reports there’s been a resurgence of image spam lately.

The summer of 2007 saw the rise of PDF spam, which used an attached PDF file to trick recipients into buying stock in a company. On August 16 of that year spam levels rose 17 percent over the day before, thanks largely to PDF spam.

So far this summer, spam levels could best be described as unpredictable, says Google, as spammers try new and “retro” techniques to get e-mail users to respond.

For example, on June 18 half of the day’s spam was sent in a two-hour window. This particular attack was newsletter spam, a relatively old-fashioned method in which e-mail messages with content masquarading as newsletters contain links to bogus Web sites.

Messagelabs, a division of Symantec, says spam accounted for 90 percent of all e-mail sent during June, which is consistent with May levels. The company agrees with Google that spam is on the rise during the second quarter of 2009, pinning average spam levels for the most recent quarter at 89 percent, up from 75 percent during the first quarter.

According to Messagelabs, in-boxes aren’t the only target for spammers since one in every 405 instant messages sent in June contained a link to a Web site hosting malicious content.

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