Spam Reports

Americans Try to Scam the World with Knockoff Products!

All, over the web

By Alexandru Dumitru, Security News Editor

4th of October 2007, 16:41 GMT

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Security giant Symantec just released its spam monthly report for September. Things have changed a bit, since the month of August, but we are still being plagued by unwanted messages.

PDF and image spam

have went lower and lower in the chart - this just proves that they're ineffective. If image spam is down at 7% of the total amount of unwanted messages, text and HTML based attacks have been grown in popularity amongst spammers.

Furthermore, the chart shows that most of the spam out there is "born in the USA", as North America is considered responsible for about 45% of all the spam messages sent. Europe ranks second in the spam chart, with more than 30%, while Asia is in third place, closing to 20%.

As for spam categories, well, things have changed since August - knockoff products advertising spam ("how about a fake Rolex?") are ranking first now, with 26% of all spam. Internet related spam came in second, at a difference of 7% while financial spam with 13% came in third, followed closely by health related spam ("Vitamin C posing as Viagra, anyone?").

So, to relate facts together, 45% of the global spam comes from North America, while 26% is about knockoff products. That means that North American spammers are responsible for about half of the product related spam, and that more than 11% of all the unwanted messages out there are product related spam, sent from North America. You don't need to be a genius to figure that one out - it's just basic math!

Fraud e-mail attacks received the smallest slice of the pie-chart with only 3%. And when I say fraud e-mails, I mean brand spoofing and phishing, the types of messages that attempt to trick users into revealing sensitive info. Whatever spam may look like and no matter what subject it uses to trick people, the advice is always the same: ignore or delete unwanted e-mails and you'll be safe.

TAGS:

spam | scam | report | September

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