3 August 2007

Quarter of all spam comes as attachment

Nick Booth, Computer Weekly

Around a quarter of all spams come as an attachment, according to a new study released by security supplier Marshal.

While the sophistication of spamming remains low at the moment, if the spammers' social engineering skills improve, Britain could face a security crisis as harmful spam causes havoc, warned Ed Rowley, Marshal's head of technical sales.

"When spam senders improve their social engineering skills and they know enough about their targets to write an enticing or convincing e-mail top line, they could net many more victims," he warned. "This is what is known as spear phishing. They know enough about you to attach a convincing looking document - like an invoice relevant to your business - and you are suckered in."

Marshal reported today that spam containing attached PDF, Excel, Text and Zip files now represents almost 25% of all spam, which has surged up from 2% last week. Meanwhile the previously dominant Image Spam has reached a 12-month low of just 6% of all spam.

"Spam senders have to constantly evolve their forms. It will not be long before they evolve to make their intros look more genuine," he warned.

Meanwhile, adds John-Paul Kamath, mass mailers and Trojans continue to be the biggest threats to consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises, according to BitDefender Labs' malware report for the first half of 2007. The Peed Trojan is the top threat to date in 2007, variants of which accounted for more than 30 per cent of all threats detected.

Trojans have proven to be the most popular type of malware this year with a generic behavior-based Trojan signature coming in second on the top 10 list.

Behaviour-based Trojans are generally detected and blocked proactively, before being assigned names and specific signatures. These proactive behaviour-based detections made up 21.4% of total detections.

Another notable threat detected by BitDefender Labs is the Win32.Sality.M virus, the only true virus to make the list. While the highly-dangerous polymorphic virus spreads using the Bagle mass mailer as one of its vectors, the Bagle virus alone did not make the 2007 list.

PDF spam-wave subsides (27 July 2007)

Britons catch more viruses (24 July 2007)

These articles first appeared on the web-site of Computer Weekly, at http://www.computerweekly.com//Articles/2007/08/03/225986/quarter-of-all-spam-comes-as-attachment-says-marshall.htm and http://www.computerweekly.com//Articles/2007/08/02/225962/mass-mailers-and-trojans-remain-biggest-threat-to-small.htm. © Reed Business Information 2007.

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