Internet security firm 'AppRiver' has released its mid-year Threat and Spamscape report which gives a detailed assessment of spam and malware trends recorded between January 2010 and June 2010. As per the report, the firm quarantined over 26 Billion spam messages in these six months.
The report claims that the year 2010 started with many international disasters. These include a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland and a destructive earthquake in Haiti. The volcanic eruption disrupted Europe's air traffic. Hackers and malware creators used these events to cheat web users and netizens. Besides the abovementioned findings, AppRiver also came across a malware attack during March 2010 that piggybacked on a mail as an official document. The malware appeared as a filed lawsuit against the e-mail recipient firms. In fact, the bogus legal document was an effective social engineering method that exploited the fear to catch victims off guard. As the April 15th deadline for filing taxes in the US approaches, AppRiver has observed increment in the fake IRS campaigns. Similarly, towards the end of March, the security firm had witnessed a huge rise in the IRS-based phishing campaign. Moreover, the year of 2010 saw the rise of Zeus Trojan. Apart from its usual tactics like disguising as having come from Facebook, MySpace, The IRS, UPS, DHL, etc, ZeuS also rose in the month of April when it appeared to have come from the "Royal Mail" of the UK, and later switched to the "Canada Post". As the FIFA World Cup soccer continue to be the major attraction at present, scams surrounding the event have significantly increased. AppRiver started to find World-Cup based spam as early as January 2010. Fred Touchette, Senior Security Analyst at AppRiver, states that nowadays spam is not only a big trouble, but is also used as a mode of heavy malware circulation and other security risks, as per the news by earthtimes.org on July 1, 2010. |
