14 DAY TRIAL // November was one of the busiest months of the year when it comes to spam messages, because the attackers prepared themselves for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday with new emails and malicious attachments. Security company Symantec said that from the total email traffic recorded in November, no less than 72 percent of it represent spam messages. But what's more important, the attackers are now looking for valid emails in order to create new lists supposed to help their future attempts.
"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", Kelly Conley of Symantec wrote on the Security Response Weblog.
Certainly, we're now expecting the Christmas spam avalanche, which is supposed to come with all sorts of unsolicited messages promoting Christmas gifts. Moreover, many of these unsolicited emails contain ecards which, once downloaded, attempt to install hidden processes and infections on the affected system. From this moment, it's only up to the hacker how much damage he wants to cause to the computer.
"While spammers showed an ever increasing sophistication in evasion techniques, those on the antispam front fought back just as hard, employing new programs, sharing information, and creating more advanced filtering techniques", the Symantec official added.
Sure, the antispam filters evolved and became more powerful, struggling to block every new avalanche of unsolicited emails targeting our inbox. But many of them proved to be useless, as they were easily bypassed by the malicious emails. So, is there any hope to remain protected? Don't know, but it is going to be a veeery long and interesting Christmas season...