MessageLabs has warned that spammers are already modifying their tactics when it comes to the emerging trend of using audio rather than text attachments in unsolicited mail.
In a statement, MessageLabs claimed that, following the first spam campaign involving audio files on 17 October 2007, which attempted to control the value of stock for “nefarious reasons”, spammers are now moving on from simply attaching audio to mail to linking through to content hosted on multimedia sites such as YouTube.
“This recent trend proves that spamming techniques are becoming more innovative,” said MessageLabs in its statement. “As image spam shifts from email attachments to images on free image-hosting sites, [we] believe that it is only a matter of time before the spammers apply the same approach to audio spam and upload the message to free multimedia-hosting sites such as YouTube, Google Video and MySpace.”
Spammers used attached MP3 music files to try to “sneak messages past spam filters”, said MessageLabs. The spam run of 15 million emails lasted 36 hours and used Storm worm-infected computers for the purposes of dissemination, MessageLabs said.
The MP3 file names were music-related, including files called “beatles.mp3″, “britney.mp3″ and “elvis.mp3″. They contained a poor-quality, 25-second voice track promoting a stock offering from Exit Only Incorporated for its Text4Cars.com website. The spam did not contain any detected malicious code.
MessageLabs, a leading provider of integrated messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for March 2007. Quarter on quarter spam levels have raised to 76.3 percent, their highest in two years. Virus and botnet activity has also increased. The report highlights the impact of increased spam levels on small-to-medium sized businesses (SME) as these organizations receive more than double the volume of spam per user each month than in enterprise organizations.
In October, 63 billion junk messages were sent daily, on average, compared with 31 billion a year ago, according to data from IronPort Systems. Another anti-spam specialist, MessageLabs, reports that 88.7 percent of all e-mail sent in October was unsolicited. That percentage is expected to rise to nearly 90 percent in November and December.
That could add up to a huge pile of unwanted e-mail. IronPort predicts that the number of spam messages will average 78 billion a day in December, up from 38 billion last year.
Internet service providers and anti-spam companies are working hard to fight this onslaught of spam. But it’s a game of cat-and-mouse, and right now, the spammers are slipping away, experts said. “The anti-spam vendors are struggling,” said Natalie Lambert, an analyst at Forrester Research. “The best vendors are able to stop about 98 percent of spam.” That still leaves 2 percent that gets through, which is a lot with the current, increasing spam levels, she added.
Source : c | net news
Spammers have figured out a number of ways to embed text into images — where anti-spam solutions based on text analyses can’t get to it. And as security vendors have begun building image spam solutions, spammers have created a series of random images for separate mailings that, again, simply won’t be flagged. Or they can put the text into multiple images in each mail. Or use obscure file formats.
Not only do the images elude anti-spam software, their malicious payloads are more likely to be launched by users. And they’re bandwidth- and storage-eaters; the average size of an image spam is 18 KB, compared to 5.5 KB for a text spam.
News Source : IT Business Edge
Postini, the mail filtering company has seen a 59 per cent spike in spam from September to November 2006. Unwanted email is currently 91 per cent of all email, and over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam rose by 120 per cent. Postini also saw a dramatic increase in overall email traffic with 10 billion more connections in October than in September.