Spam Counts and Summary

Spam Counts

My GMail account stands at 392 spam emails in the last 30 days which is down 11% from last week’s 30-day count of 440.

The OS Quest comment spam count jumped a staggering 115 to 493 from last week’s 378. This website is now in the sites of the bots and jumped from 4 to 15 spam comments in a week.

None of the spam, email or comment, made it through the filter.

Summary

This past week’s news that didn’t make it into their own posts.

Recent media reports talk about spam and viruses being combined. In this case a pump-and-dump spam email carries a trojan that installs a bot that is then used to send more spam. This doesn’t seem too original and viruses have previously replicated themselves vii email in the past. The new twist is spam botnets are used to send the email/virus rather than self-replication, and the spam is traditional in that it tries to make money for the spammers.

Eugene Kasperksy, of Kaspersky anti-virus fame, made news by predicting a rise in attacks on Mac and Linux. He predicts a slight shift away from Vista to Mac and Linux. He doesn’t say how much the shift will be. As I previously posted, I think the social engineeering factor, along with improved Vista security is going to make Macs worth targeting for web based attacks.

CNet reports on Trend Micro’s prediction that web based attackes will overtake email as the most common way to spread malware. This will occur in 2008. The reason for the shift is that email is store and forward and the protection tools are getting better. While web access is real-time and port 80 can’t be blocked. The article also touches on the motivation of spammers.

“Malware for profit is definitely driving these Web threats,” Genes said. “The last real virus we had was in 1999, Melissa. Since then it has been mostly worms and Web threats.”

Criminals are offering up to $75,000 for a Windows XP vulnerability and $50,000 for a Windows Vista vulnerability, Genes said. Security firms such as VeriSign’s iDefense and 3Com’s TippingPoint pay around $12,000, he said. “The good guys are paying, but the bad guys are paying more,” Genes said.

Trend Micro is getting ready to launch a new web security service for corporate desktops. So the motivation could be to hype their product. or, they could have the product because they believe this is true and it’s an astute marketing move.

Computing has another article that echos the theme predicting in an increase in spam.

In the catagory of reports and predictions, Virus Bulletin has a summary of reports from various anti-virus vendors about a rise in spying, zombies, spear-phishing and cracked websites. From the article:

Spam levels for the quarter have been variously measured at between 65% and 90% of all email, with pump-and-dump scams, image spam and hijacked newsletters the big ideas of the season. Botnets, still a major source of advertising and other spam, are increasingly being put to use for phishing and data theft as the trojans used to run them develop better stealth and more sophisticated data-harvesting and communication functions. China and the US are generally held to be the biggest sources of both spam and malware.

Billing World and OSS Today and Webwire have articles about the effects of spam on the mobile phone industry. They make the point that spam costs the industry considerable expense, from customer churn to the expense of the customer service calls to reverse the changes. There’s discussion of the current model of billing for both incoming and outgoing sms messages. This effectively splits the cost of spam. There’s a prediction this could result in the elimation of charges for receiving sms messages.