Again, there are few surprises in the list; however, the U.S. has solidly taken prominence in its contribution to spam volumes, having moved from sixth spot to second. And it is interesting to see Korea and Vietnam place so prominently, while the absence of countries that tend to show up on these lists \u2013 like Canada and Nigeria \u2013 is notable.<\/p>\n

Spam volumes, the report states, continue to be on the decline, but Cisco\u2019s research notes that \u201cspam remains a go-to tool for many cybercriminals, who view it as an efficient and expedient way to expose users to malware and facilitate a wide range of scams.\u201d In fact, despite the perception that spam deploys malware payloads through its email attachments, in fact, \u201cCisco\u2019s research shows that very few spammers today rely on this method; instead, they turn to malicious links within the email as a far more efficient distribution mechanism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report also notes that spam is more targeted and less \u201cscattershot\u201d than in the past, \u201cwith many spammers preferring to target specific groups of users with the hope of generating higher returns.\u201d Name brand pharmaceuticals (like Viagra) and luxury watch brands (like Rolex) are highly-promoted items, while spammers use events and holidays to promote most heavily. \u201cOver time, spammers have learned that the quickest way to attract clicks and purchases\u2014and to generate a profit\u2014is to leverage spoofed brands and take advantage of current events that have the attention of large groups of users.\u201d<\/p>\n

Overall, there was an 18% decline in spam volumes between 2011 and 2012. Cisco points out that spammers continue to minimize effort and maximize results. Spam volumes fall on the weekends, when users are AFK, and rise on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (10% higher than other weekdays), proving that spammers, too, believe that Mondays are useless and need to be done away with.<\/p>\n

Cisco notes that this schedule allows spammers to live \u2018normal lives,\u2019 but that \u201cit also gives them time to spend crafting tailored campaigns based on world events early in the week that will help them to generate a higher response rate to their campaigns.\u201d The report points out that there were several examples in 2012 of spammers taking advantage of world events and human tragedy with the intent of scamming email users. Superstorm Sandy is one significant example, where \u201cCisco researchers identified a massive \u201cpump and dump\u201d stock scam based around a spam campaign. Using a pre-existing email message that urged people to invest in a penny stock focused on natural resource exploration, the spammers began attaching sensational headlines about Superstorm Sandy.\u201d Oddly enough, the spammers used unique IP addresses to send batches of spam emails, and have not used those addresses since.<\/p>\n

Language use was notable, too. Spammers, Cisco discovered, \u201cfocus their efforts on creating spam messages that feature the languages spoken by the largest audiences who use email on a regular basis.\u201d According to Cisco research, the top languages used in spam messages during 2012 were English, Russian, Catalan, Japanese, and Danish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may sound like the setup for a cheesy punch line, but just for fun, try it out on your friends. What do India, Rolex,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[11,9,10,8,7],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","category-spam","tag-allspammedup","tag-bot","tag-botnet","tag-malware","tag-spam","jsn-master"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1769,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions\/1769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}