Fraudulent spam may increase in coming months ? Report ? The ...

Global Internet security company, Kaspersky has said that fraudulent and malicious spam may increase if the global economic crisis worsens.

The Kaspersky Lab, on Monday, said there was an increase in English-language spam promoting personal financial services in May. At that time it accounted for 23.5 per cent of all spam ? a month later it had tripled in size and reached 73 per cent.

In June, the company said the majority of the messages contained offers of illegal earnings.

The Senior Spam Analyst, Kaspersky Lab, Ms. Maria Namestnikova, said, ?Similar changes were seen during the economic downturn of 2008-2009. If this difficult economic situation prompts a repeat of that scenario, we have good reason to believe there will be an increase in the levels of fraudulent and malicious spam in the coming months. We also expect a gradual decline in the proportion of spam, which could drop to the 65 per cent mark of total mail traffic within the next year.?

In view of this, Namestnikova said the proportion of spam in mail traffic continued to fall in Q2 2012, averaging 74.3 per cent.

This was a decrease of 2.3 percentage points compared to the previous quarter. In addition to seasonal factors, she said the trend might also be related to the difficult economic situation prevailing in the world.

A few years ago new online services that offered users collective discounts, or so-called coupons, appeared on the Internet. Coupon services have played a dual role in western spam ? on the one hand, spammers have used ?coupon? mailings to grab the attention of potential victims. At the same time, the coupon system has drawn off part of the legal advertising previously seen in spam. As a result the amount of spam mailings in western mail traffic has decreased.

In April, Kaspersky said it detected spam that imitated an official Facebook notification. However, the links in the emails did not take users to hacked domains or sites, but to pages on Wikipedia and Amazon.

However, employees on both websites responded promptly, and by the time the links were spread the pages had already been disabled.

One of the main topics in unsolicited mail since April, Kaspersky said, had been the situation in Syria, which was exploited by ?Nigerian? spammers in Q2.

Mail traffic included emails from ?Assad?s wife?, ?Assad?s family members? and ordinary Syrians.

?Among the most high-profile events of Q2 was June?s Euro 2012 Football Championship. Since then the Olympics Games in London have been the focus for scammers, who have been announcing lottery wins allegedly from a lottery held by the Olympics Foundation. The closer the Olympics came, the more actively the spammers worked,? Namestnikova said

In Q2 2012, the geography of spam by country changed considerably. China unexpectedly took the lead ? 19 per cent of all spam originated from its territory. Several years ago China was among the leaders of the spam rating but after the adoption of its anti-spam law in 2006 the quantity of junk mail being spread from its territory decreased significantly. Six years later and the spammers seem to have forgotten about this law as it is not being actively enforced.

After a long break, the top three spam sources saw the return of the United States which shared second place with India having distributed the same quantity of spam each ? 11.7 per cent. Vietnam came third having distributed 4.97 per cent of all spam. Despite the relocation of spam sources the key trends remain the same: an increasing amount of junk mail is emanating from Asia and Latin America.

Meanwhile, Kaspersky had said the architecture of the IT departments for most companies had drastically changed over the past few years and with the uptake of mobile devices and virtualisation, security threats had altered.

IT security, according to the company, continues to remain a key challenge and priority for IT departments.

In view of this, the security company said there was the need for increased cyber security education among all stakeholders.

Worldwide, businesses have had to adapt to the influx of new technological trends such as cloud computing, virtualisation, and Bring Your Own Devices.

This has impacted on not only how IT managers approach security but also on how businesses and consumers need to understand the potential security risks associated with the increasing reliance on mobile devices and technological capabilities.

The Senior Security Researcher, Kaspersky Lab, Mr. David Jacoby, said, ?While security experts tend to focus on future technologies for protecting potential threats, one still needs to be cognisant of incidents that have also happened in the past. By learning from these issues, we are able to build stronger and safer IT security communities for businesses and consumers alike.?

Although users acknowledge the existence of various online threats, they are generally still reckless when it comes to IT security. In fact, it has been reported that approximately 16 per ent of Microsoft-based laptop users, 50 per cent of Macbook users, and 65 per cent of smartphone users do not use any kind of security software on their devices.

This indicates that consumers and businesses still need to be educated on the implications of not taking IT and online security seriously.

?Businesses and consumers are becoming more digitally advanced. As a security company, our responsibility should be to ensure that users are aware of the threats and dangers of the Internet and new technologies, as they continue to emerge. Educating users on such a simple thing as e-mail scams can have a ripple effect on the security landscape of a region,? Jacoby said.

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Source: http://www.punchng.com/business/technology/fraudulent-spam-may-increase-in-coming-months-report/

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