Kaspersky Lab: Spammers Do Their Own Advertising

Aug 27, 2009

In its semi-annual spam report, the Russian security experts Kaspersky Lab have concluded the economic crisis has had no bearing on the amount of spam distributed worldwide. However, spammers have had to turn to creating ads for their very own services.

85% of all email traffic is spam. In the first half of 2009, this horribly high percentage remained stagnant. Upon closer inspection, it was revealed that .3% of these spam messages contained harmful attachments. Another .6% of all email was sent with the attempt to lure recipients onto phishing sites, which lead to a successive decline of .78%.

The Russian spam experts thus inferred that anti-phishing systems were better able to protect users from falling prey to phishing scams and for this reason made such methods of spamming unattractive to cyber crooks. PayPal remained the main target of all phishing attempts, but improved protection also deterred criminals from successfully filching customer data.

Pronounced changes have ocurred within the category of countries of origin. India, Thailand, Romania, and Poland have landed on the Top 10 list of spammers. Spain, Italy, Germany, and Ukraine are no longer among the 10 most prolific spammers. Russia and the USA have remained the top runners, but with lower numbers. Russia’s spammers sent 22% of all the mail in 2008, but had sunk to a lowly 11% in the first half of 2009. The USA went from a spam-share of 16% to a mere 10%.

The most popular category of spam mail has remained the infamous health and medicine field with 22%. An immense rise in the segment of advertising for spammer service has occured. An increase of 10% shows that spam senders have had to busy themselves with attracting customers to services. The financial hardship of late has lead spammers to lose a good chunk of their main customers, Kaspersky concluded.

That spammers would like to advertise their own products has not been proven, however. Spammer sent self-promotion is thought to be sent as graphic spam for two reasons. One reason mentioned is the fact that spam filters can be out-smarted, and the second reason given is that spammers would choose to provide more attractive ads for their own products. The report also indicates the belief that not only anti-virus specialists work in the spamming business now, but also professional design and marketing experts. The semi-annual report is to be found online.

Related content

  • Blocking Spam Intro

    Spammers charge real money for their dubious services, and hundreds of advertisers are willing to pay. We’ll show you some innovative techniques for controlling and containing spam, including strategies for slowing down spam bots, keeping spammers from getting your address, and separating spam from legitimate email.

  • Silicon Valley Spam-Slinger Knocked out Cold

    Russia may not be the only place spam hosts lay in wait. Tuesday of this week San Jose webhoster McColo went offline. The result is that the world's spam rate is now down by three-quarters, at least according to the Washington Post's online service.

  • Tarpits

    A tarpit slows down spam by reducing the effectiveness of the spammer’s weapons.

  • Spam Test

    Spam filters can help smooth the waves in your inbox, as long as they are reliable and don’t have too many side effects. We’ll show you what we found when we tested five antispam appliances and two service providers.

  • SpamAssassin

    Even if you do not have a mail server of your own, SpamAssassin can help you filter out unsolicited junk mail. This article describes how SpamAssassin collaborates with Evolution and KMail. Thunderbird, on the other hand, has its own simple spam-detection feature.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News