Spam is Getting More Malicious
November 11, 2009
Symantec has released two new reports for the month of November - the State of Spam, and the State of Phishing (both PDFs). The reports highlight a dramatic increase in spam that contains malware. On top of that, junk and malicious email now accounts for close to 9 out of 10 email messages.
The security firm says that a new generation of "Spam Princes" are rising, and that the Asia Pacific region, Japan, and South America have surpassed North America, with regards to where spam is originating from.
"Rising spam levels originating from South America, Asia Pacific and Japan are not altogether surprising when you consider the massive growth of internet connections in these regions," says Amanda Grady, Principal Analyst, Symantec. "Meanwhile, the increased threats to social networking websites is interesting because it shows spammers are hiding behind the reputation and brand trust built by legitimate companies. Social networking sites that have a large user base will continue to be targets of malicious and phishing emails."
Symantec shares the following findings:
- In October, an average of 1.9% of all spam messages contained malware. This equates to a 0.6% increase from September, when the number of messages containing malware hit a maximum of 4.5% of all spam
- Symantec observed a 17% increase from the previous month in all phishing attacks
- 30% of phishing URLs were generated using phishing toolkits; an increase of 24% from the previous month
- Symantec observed a 45% increase from September in non-English phishing sites
- More than 97 Web hosting services were used, which accounted for 8% of all phishing attacks; a decrease of 19% in total Web host URLs when compared to the previous month
Symantec's report of an increase of malware-infected spam is made even more unsettling as news reports surface of computer viruses infecting unknowing victims' machines with child porn.
Have You Read This?
> Stealth Phishing Attack Looks Like Internal Email
> Symantec Urges Windows Users to Patch Systems
Report: One-Fourth Of All Tweets Generated By Bots
August 6, 2009
A lot of activity on Twitter might well consist of bots talking to each other, according to a new report. Sysomos - which last month pointed out that 5 percent of Twitter's users account for 75 percent of the site's activity - has now indicated that many of the most dedicated users aren't human.
Alex Cheng and Mark Evans wrote, "We found that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day."
But anyway, the pair continued, "Based on our previous 'Inside Twitter' report and this report on the most active users, 24% or one-quarter of all tweets overall, are generated by these very active bots."
That may wind up being either a bad or good thing. Although folks who head to Twitter for human interaction are obviously in trouble, the prevalence of bots could go to show that legitimate companies are getting the hang of the site. And from Twitter's perspective, they should represent a crowd ripe for monetization.
If you'd like to hear often from someone with an actual heart and soul, though, there are some options. Cheng and Evans found that Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan with an average of 43 tweets per day), Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki, 39 tweets daily), Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano, 37 tweets daily), and Jonathan Ross (@wossy, 37 tweets daily) are some of the leading human Twitter users.
