BitDefender has reported that stocks and sex-related drugs are subjects that are commonly related to image and text spam for the first half of 2007. It has also reported that spammers tend to send emails to fewer recipients with small variations to try and avoid early detection.
Head of BitDefender’s Antispam Lab, Vlad Valceanu said, “Among the trends we found were that spammers are e-mailing fewer targets at a time, while introducing small variations in every e-mail sent in hopes of avoiding timely detection. We expect to see more of this in the next half of the year, as well as an increased use of attachments and possibly even embedded flash.”
New types of spam have emerged in 2007, most notably hosted-image spam, which instead of containing an image, provides a link to a website hosting the spam. Spam with attachments, such as a PDF file, is another type of spam that has become more apparent since the beginning of 2007.
Messages that focused on pump-and-dump penny stocks were the most prevalent of all spam messages, and image spam was the medium of choice for the senders of these spam messages, in the first half of the year.
The most common subjects of image spam since January 2007 according to BitDefender Labs included:
- Stock 75%
- Drugs (sex-related) 8.1%
- Replica watches 5%
- Mortgage 4%
- Phishing 2%
- Porn 2 %
- Diploma 1%
- Drugs (weight-loss related) 0.9%
- Travel 0.5%
- Software 0.5%
- Other topics 1%
BitDefender Labs also found that drug-related topics were the preferred choice of spammers. Spam messages focused on sexual enhancing and weight loss drugs accounted for a whopping 56.2% of all text spam, while spam messages focused on replica watches came in at the third place in both of BitDefender’s image and text spam lists.
The most common subjects of text spam since January 2007 included:
- Drugs (sex-related) 42.5%
- Drugs (weight-loss related) 13.8%
- Replica watches 9.1%
- Mortgage 7.4%
- Phishing 4.2%
- Electronics 3.8%
- Traveling 3.6%
- Stock 3.6%
- Software 2.5%
- Diploma 2.1%
- Grants 1.5%
- Dating 0.5%
- Other topics 5.4%
See: www.bitdefender.com.au
