14 DAY TRIAL // The help-wanted ads are circulating the underground Internet channels and the desired applicants must be hackers and nothing less. As the web society evolves, so must the attacks and now after all of the major companies opened local branches to deal with the problems that might show up in the course of time (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the list goes on), cyber criminals are hiring new people putting very much emphasis on their language skills. Also, to go local.
A survey conducted by McAfee has showed that only 67 percent of the spam is now written in English, and the rest is mostly Mandarin, Portuguese and Russian, a great increase in the non-English language spam that only a few years ago accounted for less than 10 percent. Keeping to the trend of globalization, hackers want to attend to that third of spam and make it as grammatically correct as possible.
It sounds hilarious, but it's actually a smart move from cyber criminals, to turn spam that might be recognized as fake by a native speaker at any time, into the compelling email delivering malware that would appeal to the victims. Furthermore, if authorities aren't on the lookout or are just incapable of fighting the crimes, hackers can easily direct their attention to it due to the smaller risk of getting caught.
"It speaks to the underlying professionalism and understanding of business that we've seen in the past few years, and that we haven't seen in the past. [?] They're approaching malware as a business and are looking to build their businesses globally," said David Marcus, security research and communications manager with McAfee.
The progress made in the last years was visible even in the English written spam. If a few years ago a large percentage of it contained typos and other errors, only about 10 percent still does nowadays, Marcus stated.