December 2010 was a month in which the spammers exploited the huge global interest in WikiLeaks, as well as the more mundane theme of Christmas and New Year holidays, according to Kaspersky Lab's spam report for the month.
The security company says its spam analysts registered several mass mailings calling on users to spread WikiLeaks links in the name of democracy.
“Spammers also mentioned the WikiLeaks name in background noise texts used to bypass spam filters.
“They were mostly quotes from material published on the site, or news about the portal itself. Interestingly, the word WikiLeaks was often inserted in links in another bid to evade the filters,” Kaspersky says.
The firm also discovered that in December, India remained the single-most popular source for spam, accounting for 9.9% of the total volume with Russia in second place (8.5%), having overtaken Italy (4.8%) and Vietnam (4.7%). It adds that Brazil completed the top five, accounting for 4.4% of world spam.
However, it notes that there was a significant drop (1,6%) in the amount of spam emanating from Western Europe, with 4.3% coming from the UK, 2.2% from France and 1.8% from Germany.
“Malicious files were found in 1.75% of all e-mails, an increase of [0.15%] compared with the previous month. As was the case in November, most malware was detected in mail traffic received by users in India, Russia and Vietnam.”
According to the findings, the legal war on botnets once again came to the fore in December with criminal proceedings being instigated in the US in the case of Russian citizen Oleg Nikolaenko who is suspected of creating and running the Mega-D zombie network, also known as Ozdok.
The botnet's infected machines were used to distribute partner spam containing adverts for medications and fake designer goods, it was discovered, and Kaspersky claims that at its peak, the network's zombies could distribute up to 30% to 35% of world spam.
“Spam is usually dominated by the Christmas and New Year holiday theme in December, but in 2010 it had to share the limelight with WikiLeaks, which once again underlines just how serious the scandal surrounding the website was at the end of the year,” commented Maria Namestnikova, senior spam analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
“Immediately before the start of the holidays, we witnessed a dip in the amount of spam. This is a seasonal phenomenon - at the end of the year the amount of spam mailings always falls off because a lot of the infected botnet computers are switched off',” she says.
Namestnikova adds that as for the case of Nikolaenko, it demonstrates yet again the need to introduce tougher anti-spam laws in Russia.
“As it stands, one of the major players in the spam business faced no charges in his own country because of shortcomings in the spam legislation.”
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