After falling out of fashion, background noise techniques, such as 'White Text', are on the rise once more.
Global IT security company Kaspersky Lab has published its Q1 2013 spam report, showing a slight increase (0.53%) in unsolicited correspondence and malicious attachments (up 3.3%), while phishing e-mails fell overall, to 0.0004%, 4.25 times smaller than the end of last year's count.
"White Text" works by including parts of other texts in an e-mail, with a grey font colour over a grey background, rendering it invisible; this text, currently, is most commonly fragments of news articles. Content-sensitive filters have a hard time figuring out what e-mails to block, as the random fragmenting approach means e-mails are unique and difficult to automatically detect.
"In Q1 2013, the percentage of unsolicited correspondence in mail traffic fluctuated from month to month, although the average figure remained practically unchanged from the previous quarter. We expect the share of spam to remain at its present level in the future or grow slightly due to the recent increase in the number of multimillion mass mailings," commented Tatyana Shcherbakova, senior spam analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
In addition to the noise technique approach, spammers are also exploiting online services to confuse filters, such as shortening a URL with Yahoo, then putting it through Google Translate, allowing for unique versions of links to malicious sites to be spread easily, says Kaspersky.
According to the report, Google and Yahoo's names add additional legitimacy, increasing the likelihood of these links being clicked. Especially relevant is the continued usage of high-profile events in spam, with the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Pope Benedict XVI's resignation and the new Pope's inauguration being common topics.
"Spammers keep trying to draw users' attention to their messages: they use famous names, world events or fake notifications from popular online resources. Many e-mails contain links to malicious programs, including exploits," Shcherbakova said.
By implying scandal, or special announcements, from the BBC or CNN, spammers catch users off guard, especially when the link supplied is connected to a respectable site such as Yahoo or Google. Shcherbakova highlighted the importance of link-awareness. "We would like, once again, to remind users not to click the links in e-mails, even if the sender appears to be someone you know. It is much safer to enter the address in the browser manually."
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