Amount of spam is back to "normal"

Symantec recently reported that amount of spam is almost back to same level when dubious McColo was shut down in November 2008 being now 91% of it.

Currently 94 percent of all emails are spam. Current spam trend seems to be loans and real estate business. Spam emails offer help for people who need to sell their apartment or advice for loans.

Obama and Palin are spam debate rulers

PcMag wrote about
current spam trends.

Currently amount of Obama spam is six times greater than McCain one.

When it comes to vice president candidates, Palin beats Biden by a ratio of 5 to 4.

Most of those spam are not about politics but content can thing called "gibberish spam", that is spam messages which contents makes no sense.

Surprisingly many has purchased from spam

Security company Marshall has made a research regarding to spam.

According to that research, 29 percent of Internet users have purchased goods from spam emails which is almost unbelievable.

Most popular items have been eg. sexual enhancement pills (fake Viagra etc.), software, adult material and luxury items.

Marshall Vice President says below more about this issue. Especially interesting is that people purchase illegitimate products:

“Spam has become a mainstream means of advertising for restricted or counterfeit goods due to strong demand from Internet users. Many of us don’t consider spam to be a legitimate marketing practice, but the products that people are buying aren’t legitimate. There is a huge market for cheap goods that are otherwise expensive or hard difficult to come by via legitimate means”

Over ten million zombie computers worldwide

Zombie computer means a computer which is eg. part of botnet. Cybercriminals use botnets for DoS (Denial of Service) attacks and spreading malware and spam.

Panda and CommTouch have released a report about email threats.

In that report says that there are over ten million zombie computers worldwide.
Eleven per cent of them are from Turkey, Brazil and Russia are next ones. These are responsible for majority of spam. According to latest researches, 74 per cent of all mails are spam.

Luis Corrons from Panda says that this effects to resources according to Nucleus Research

Like header says spam costs 712 dollars a year per employee.

Websites more and more under attack

Security company Sophos stated in new report that one web site is under attack every five seconds.

It counted that 15 000 web sites got infected daily from January to March. Last year daily average was 6 000 web sites so threats really are in the rise.

79 per cent of web sites infected this year are legal sites. But there is also good news. Amount of malware included in emails has been decreased. Now one email of 2500 contains malware and that is 40 per cent less than last year.

But not everything is so bright. 92 per cent of all emails were spam during Jan-Mar. Greatest spammer was USA and other great spammers were eg. Russia and China.

Source: Sophos

Spammers have entered GMail

Websense Security Labs has announced that spammers have managed to circumvent GMails CAPTCHA recognition

This means that you can get spam from GMail address in the future.

Websense says that spammers might get many benefits from using GMail. It's very unlikely that GMail mails would be blacklisted and GMail has so many users that picking spammers among them would be very difficult.

About half a million computers get bot infection daily

About half a million computers get bot infection daily, tells PandaLabs in its 2007 annual report.

Around 11 percent of all computers belong to botnets which is extremely scary. Those computers send over 85 percent of all spam mail.

- Creator of botnet can lease it to others. Internet criminals use those in many criminals acts like infecting those computers and for DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. One of the most commonly used ways is sending of spam mailsm, tells PandaLabs leader Luis Corrons.

In year 2007 over a half of home user mails were spam. And situation is even more difficulties in companies, same amount was there between 80 and 95 percent.

The origin of spam mail was in almost 60 percent of all cases Russia and in 60 percent of all cases USA. Other major spammer countries were Turkey (6 %), Germany (5 %) and Great Britain (3 %).

Source: Panda

Spam emails reached new record

According to Symantec 72 percent of emails were spam in November.

That was because spammers tried to find new working emails using a method that if mail didn't come back, mail address works.

Bill Gates said on 2004 that spam will be defeated within 2 years. Well that's not exactly what has happen.

Amount of spam emails has raised from 56 percent in 2006 to 72 percent in Nov 2007.

Spam tacticts include eg. seasonal spams (Christmas, Thanksgiving etc.), image spams, attachment spams and pump-and-dump spams.

Read more here