Those of you who follow this type of thing know that e-mail spam levels have declined in the recent past, due to a number of factors:
- First, several takedowns of high volume botnets have bitten a large chunk out the automation of e-mail spam.
- Then there’s the simple fact that we’ve been reporting for a while now – that users have gotten more savvy to the dangers of spam, and so have the spammers. Spam in its basest form just isn’t that successful anymore because, let’s face it, there are only so many Nigerian princes needing to get their money out of the country.
- Spammers have gotten more targeted and more personal in their attacks. Most of the data we’ve seen over the past year or so suggests that spammers are having much more success when they learn something about their targets and take the personal approach. It makes sense, doesn’t it? If you’re going to try to bilk someone out of their hard-earned Benjamins, then you should at least know their name and where they live.
- Spammers have found a new place to drop their drawers, as it were. Social media sites are resplendent with users who have less than no clue about the inherent dangers of a single mouse click. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and others are breeding grounds for spam artists who know, just like you and I do, that users will share things about themselves online that they probably wouldn’t share with a stranger if they met him on the street. Ironic, isn’t it?
- Then there’s mobile spam. Texting, whether successful or not, seems to be the new fad among spammers, perhaps because their fingers are so tired from counting all their money that all they have left to type with is their thumbs. As it turns out, it can be lucrative, too.
The Sign Reads “Will Fight Spam for Food”
So this massive shift in direction seems to indicate that those of us in the business of protecting users from the dangers of e-mail spam are out of a job, doesn’t it? Not so fast, Chippy. First, the law of First In, Last Out applies here. The fact of the matter is that spam’s been around way longer than those texty little handheld virus machines that reside in your pocket like a security breach just waiting to happen.
E-mail’s gotten more ubiquitous, not less, than it was five or ten years ago. It’s nothing to have five or more e-mail addys that you use on a regular basis. Add up the amount of spam that each receive on a weekly basis. Just because the spammers have gotten smarter and spam e-mail volumes have gone down, it’s not time to crack the champagne just yet. In fact, most of the reduced volume of spam e-mail was the absolute junk, the senseless rubbish that even the most gray-matter challenged among us wouldn’t fall for in a billion years.
Spam Up, So are Nasty Attachments
If you doubt what I’m saying, then look no further than two articles published recently. The first, from The Hindu Business Line, is a story entitled “Spam mails surge in April.” Turns out that recent evidence shows a spike in spam e-mail activity last month, according to Kaspersky Labs. Interestingly enough, the new activity seems to indicate a shift in where spam is coming from, at least on the short term. “The US emerged the second biggest distributor of junk mails,” the article points out, “and such mails emanating from China too was found to have risen by five percentage points, taking the country to the fifth position among the world’s top sources of spam.” A spokesperson at Kaspersky notes that malicious attachments are still a favorite tool of the spammer, and the article points out that, as one would expect, trending spam topics right now include the French and American elections, as well as the European football championships and the upcoming Summer Olympics in London. Hey, spammers are nothing if not on top of current affairs.
The other article worth mentioning here is from Help Net Security. Entitled “Spam with malicious attachments rising,” the name pretty much says it all. Even as we’re seeing the volume of spam going down, the ratio of nasty, malware-laden spam is on the rise, suggesting that the spammers have pulled out the stops in terms of delivering their payload, sort of a spam Blitzkrieg, one might surmise. Why? It’s anyone’s guess. What have you noticed?