Wednesday, 19 December 2007

Top 12 Christmas Spam

‘Tis may be the season to be jolly but it is, at the same time, the season to be acutely aware of malicious online attacks as well.

Symantec has been monitoring some 450 million inboxes worldwide and observed that spam has surged up to 72 percent of overall email traffic in November.

Spammers were also on the hunt for new email addresses, initiating a massive harvesting campaign. During a harvesting campaign spammers bombard email servers with guessed email addresses. Those that are not rejected are assumed to be valid email addresses and are added to spam lists for future attacks. Symantec estimates that it blocked approximately 35 million of these harvesting emails.

Symantec advices users to be cautions of emails that pertain to the following topics over the holiday season:

- Laptops
- Replica watches
- Business cards
- HDTVs
- Male enhancement drugs
- MP3 Players
- Discount software
- Free cellphones
- Handheld video games
- Cameras
- Weight loss solutions
- Gift cards

It also recommends users to protect their desktops with an up-to-date antivirus, firewall, and spam filter and to not click on, or reply to, any email that appears to be spam. Doing so could alert the spammer(s) that the user is replying from a legitimate email address (therefore, the spammer would find it worth the time to send more spam in the direction of that Inbox). Users should also not click on any link in a suspicious email. If it is felt that the sender is legitimate, contact the sender directly (not by email) to ensure the email message is also legitimate.