Spam: Why spam isn’t going away soon
March 14th, 2008 by Shanmuga
“Recently, Symantec said in its February 2008 State of Spam report that 78.5 percent of all e-mail is spam; they also said most of that is now coming from Europe. That’s a change from previous reports that had suggested servers in North America were responsible. What the Symantec report doesn’t explicitly state is that much of the European spam doesn’t come from individuals sitting at their desks pumping out lists. Europe is one of the hotbeds for the Storm worm botnet, notorious for automatically co-opting its victims into spam relays.
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"We recently saw instances of actual attackers attempting a basic version of drive-by pharming. Given the simplicity of the attack and the potential widespread implications, we always felt that it would simply be a matter of time before it happened. The building blocks have been out there for some time and anyone with sufficient familiarity could easily put them together. I’ve said before and I’d like to reiterate that the technical details of the attack are not nearly as noteworthy as the potential widespread implications.
"The scale and sophistication of this emerging banking Trojan is worrying, even for someone who sees banking Trojans on a daily basis. This Trojan downloads a configuration file that contains the domain names of over 400 banks. Not only are the usual large American banks targeted but banks in many other countries are also targeted, including France, Spain, Ireland, the UK, Finland, Turkey—the list goes on.
"Searches for news about Bhutto’s killing and the ensuing chaos in Pakistan listed sites pimping a bogus video coder/decoder (codec), said analysts at McAfee Inc., Symantec Corp. and WebSense Inc. For instance, WebSense found such a site simply by using "benazir" to search on Google. Meanwhile, McAfee quickly located 10 sites hosted on Blogger.com, Google Inc.’s blog service, that were spreading the fake codec.
