Spammers continue to capitalise on Jackson interest

By dominic_cook | July 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment

As the world mourns the loss of a musical hero, spammers are jumping on the bandwagon and using it as a tactic to distribute spam. Since his death on June 25, several spam and malware campaigns have taken shape. The spam subject headings used have been as creative and emotive as ever, with the likes of, ‘Jackson is still alive: proof’ and ‘Jackson ordered to close Neverland’, being used. As the media interest surrounding MJ’s life and death continues, we are likely to see plenty more Michael Jackson related spam traffic hitting the web.

Image spam made an unwelcome return last month. Spammers manipulate images by using geo-metric shapes and figures in the background and mutate images to include cartoon visual comparisons of the male anatomy along with the advertised website.

The State of Spam Report also includes the following highlights:

4th of July holiday brings fireworks and more spam campaigns
The origin of spam from different regions
Mass-mailing worm in fake Twitter account invite

In addition, the July 2009 State of Phishing Report highlights the following trends:

A 21 percent increase from the previous month in all phishing attacks
A 9 percent increase in the total number of phishing URLs generated using phishing toolkits. However, when compared against all phishing attacks the proportion of phishing URLs using toolkits actually reduced to 38 percent. This decrease can be partially attributed to a significant increase in the total number of phishing URLs utilising free Web-hosting services.
More than 143 Web hosting services were used, which accounted for 10 percent of all phishing attacks; a staggering increase of 96 percent from the previous month
A 21 percent increase in non-English phishing sites
A new phishing tactic used in an attack targeting the Australian Taxa-tion Office

Dominic Cook

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