Spammers produced topical new versions of the old ‘Nigerian Letter’ scam, only based on the Ebola virus. According to Kaspersky Lab, several mass mailings in September exploited that topical theme.
· The percentage of spam in September’s email traffic averaged 66.5pc, which is 0.7 percentage points down from August;
· The main distributors of spam were the USA (12pc), Vietnam (9.3pc) and Russia (5.8pc);
· In September, Germany became the country with the most antivirus detections (9.11pc) followed by the UK (8.45pc) and the USA (8.26pc);
· Financial phishing accounted for 36.97 per cent of all detections made by Kaspersky Lab’s anti-phishing component, a 1.7 pp growth compared with the previous month.
Infected spam
In September, the researchers came across an email from a rich Liberian lady dying of Ebola. It contained a long story about her children who died from the virus and about a local medical centre that refused to help her. She was willing to donate more than $1.5 million to a recipient who would transfer this money to appropriate charities. The authors of another fraudulent mailing introduced themselves as employees of the World Health Organisation and tried an unusual tack to attract attention – the reader was invited to a conference where Ebola would be discussed along with other medical issues. The recipient was also offered a job – paying 350,000 Euros a year – and a complementary car to take up a position as the WHO’s UK representative.
Tatyana Shcherbakova, Senior spam analyst at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Spammers routinely try to exploit breaking news and topical events. The scammers seldom miss an opportunity to use high-profile events to attract the users’ attention and convince them that these fraudulent emails are for real. So after the first news reports about Ebola emerged in July, it was no surprise to start seeing related mass mailings as early as September, exploiting the headlines to deceive recipients and extort money from them.”
A theme of that month was spam messages advertising various ways to earn money online using popular social networking sites. Most often, spammers offered to create an individual profile or a group in Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, to design a page according to the concept of the company and the goods it sells, to provide the first subscribers as well as to create the primary content and begin to actively promote it. Naturally, all this came at a cost.
Visit the Securelist website – http://securelist.com/analysis/monthly-spam-reports/67312/spam-in-september-2014/
