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 | | http://www.securitymanager.net/magazine/news_h30355_commtouch_releases_first_quarter_2008_email.html |
Spammers and Malware Writers Leverage Third-Party Tools to Bypass Traditional Mail Filters
Commtouch® today released its Q1 2008 Email Threats Trend Report, based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines recent trends in email threats such as the use of legitimate third-party web sites and email messages to cloak spam and malware content.
Highlights of the report include:
* Spam levels ranged between 60 and 94 percent of all email throughout the quarter
* Malware distributors and spammers found ingenious ways to hide their unwanted messages within legitimate or legitimate-appearing web sites and messages
* Spammers leveraged the high level of interest early in the quarter in mortgages, with mortgage refinancing spam jumping to 10% of all spam at its peak
* Holidays continued to be celebrated in spam and malware, with outbreaks in honor of Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and April Fools’ Day
* On average throughout the quarter, 355,000 zombies were newly activated each day to participate in malicious activity
"Malicious emailers will use any freely available tool to their advantage, including Hotmail, Flickr, Blogspot and even Google and Yahoo calendar tools,” said Amir Lev, Commtouch’s chief technology officer and president. "Traditional content filtering tools are limited in the ways they can isolate the illegitimate emails that cloak their messages in legitimate content, since aggressive filtering will lead to false positives.”
Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection technology identifies and blocks these and other types of message subterfuge, keeping inboxes free of spam and malware.
More details, including samples of spam and malware messages are available in the Commtouch Q1 2008 Email Threats Trend Report, available from Commtouch Labs at: http://www.commtouch.com/downloads/Commtouch_2008_Q1_Email_Threats.pdf.
07.04.2008, Commtouch
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