Theft spam, fraud and web threats may rival ad spam

Spring threat reports show rise in spying, zombies, spear-phishing and cracked websites.

A series of reports released in recent weeks, surveying the latest developments in spam and online threats, have shown a rise in data theft and other serious online crimes, alongside a thriving spamming industry reaping money from advertising of suspect merchandise and stock fraud operations.

Spam levels for the quarter have been variously measured at between 65% and 90% of all email, with pump-and-dump scams, image spam and hijacked newsletters the big ideas of the season. Botnets, still a major source of advertising and other spam, are increasingly being put to use for phishing and data theft as the trojans used to run them develop better stealth and more sophisticated data-harvesting and communication functions. China and the US are generally held to be the biggest sources of both spam and malware.

Symantec's spring threat report (summary here, full PDF here) highlights the latest advances in cybercrime activities, reporting large rises in the numbers of bot-infected computers, greater diversity in the malware used to run them, and a broadening of phishing attacks to target smaller online businesses and more focused groups of victims.

This trend is reflected in MessageLabs' latest spam summary, which can be found on its site and indicates an increase in targeted phishing, and also a decline in the spamming of malware as email attachments in favour of links of web-borne malware, often exploiting vulnerabilities to install silently.

Sophos's latest figures (here) back this up, with much of the new malware spotted being hosted on websites rather than sent via email. 70% of these hosting sites are revealed to be genuine sites which have been hijacked, again generally via software or operating system vulnerabilities, rather than created with entirely malicious intent. The report also finds that 5% of all spam in the last three months was sent via a single Polish ISP.

The second of McAfee's Sage reports, covering in some detail the latest trends in malware and spam, also focuses on data theft, data leakage, and various forms of cybercrime, with spyware seen as a particularly dangerous threat as it begins to migrate to mobile platforms. The full annual report, a sizeable PDF, is here.

24 April 2007

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