Spam levels continue to increase with June rising by 1.4 per cent and averaging 71.1 per cent, according to a spam report by Kaspersky Lab.
Kaspersky Lab said one of the methods spammers used to seek attention was the use of the name of the late Apple’s founder Steve Jobs on the pretence of telling the secret of his business success.
Once viewers had accepted the email, the spammers had on the body of the email an advertisement for free training sessions on how to make a profitable business out of a hobby in 90 minutes.
Apart from Jobs’ ‘secret of success’, the spammers also targeted buyers by sending spam messages offering huge discounts on Apple gadgets with the spammers entering the company’s name in the from field.
To get more attention the spammers insisted there were very few products for the offer encouraging for a quick decision from the ‘buyers’.
“In June, spammers continued to use familiar tricks,” said Tatyana Shcherbakova, senior spam analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
“In particular, we recorded several mass mailings advertising both conventional and electronic cigarettes where the organizers used the Google Translate service to process spam links. Moreover, the spammers added a randomly generated set of letters and names of Google domains in different languages to the end of links.”
A majority of the world spam was from East Asia with 57.3 percent of all spam. China contributed 24 per cent, while the US which had 17 per cent and South Korea produced 14 per cent.
Africa remained the lowest source of spam with 0.8 per cent of all spam.
Other than spamming, phishing emails increased slightly to average 0.0032 per cent with organisations targeted including social media, search engines and financial and e-pay organisations and banks.
“The amount of attacks targeting email and IMS increased drastically, because in the summer holidays the number of email users and the users of such programs as ICQ, Jabber, Skype, etc grows. There is substantial demand for accounts of this type on the black market, which encourages phishers to try to grab login details for them,” reads the report.
There was however a 1 per cent drop in malicious attachments found in all emails with scammers still employing notifications sent on behalf of well known companies.
