Worldwide spam leapt almost two percentage points to make up 92% of all electronic messages sent last month, and as more devices connect to the Internet, it is expected to grow.
Global anti-virus company Symantec says spam made up 91.89% of all messages in July, compared with 88.32% in June. Symantec's August “State of Spam and Phishing” report points out that the subject matter of spam mails has shifted away from the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
Symantec says the focus is now on using the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a means of trapping unsuspecting e-mail users. Another focus area is the upcoming Cricket World Cup, which kicks off next February.
Steven Ambrose, MD of WWW Strategy, says the number of users connecting to the Internet through various devices is shortly expected to hit five billion. As a result of more people connecting to the Web, spam is expected to increase, he adds.
Ambrose says, although the cost of spam taking up bandwidth is coming down as the price of connectivity decreases, spam does cost companies in terms of lost productivity.
Football frenzy
Symantec says subject lines relating to Fifa 2010 World Cup news dominated its “Spam Street Journal” in June. The journal is a collection of news headlines from multiple media outlets, in different categories, which are compared with subject lines seen in Symantec's Global Intelligence Network.
When the 2010 World Cup was in full force in June, subject lines relating to the tournament accounted for eight out of 10 e-mails. In July, however, there was a turnaround with the focus shifting back to other current events like the oil spill and the economy.
Phishing sites promoting the ICC 2011 Cricket World Cup have already been observed, and one spoofs a popular social networking site and has a logo of the brand containing some artwork, says Symantec.
The phishing site claims that users can get tickets to the matches by entering their login credentials. If the fraudsters are successful with the lure, users will give up their login credentials to the phishing site in the hopes of obtaining tickets for the Cricket World Cup.
Phishing lures
According to the report, spammers mostly left the e-mail subject line blank. Other well-used subject lines included:
* Delivery status notification (failure)
* Outlook setup notification'
* You have received an [sic] greeting card
* Reset your Facebook password
* Angelina Jolie invited you to join Facebook
Symantec notes that health-related spam increased 13 percentage points over the previous month. This particular spam category includes messages promoting online pharmacies and counterfeit drugs, the anti-virus company says.
However, phishing attacks decreased by 5%, although the number of phishing sites in languages other than English rose 15%.
Symantec's report adds that spam coming from the US increased by two percentage points, but spam from Germany, France and Romania declined by a percentage point.
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