The China Earthquake Was Used to Spread Viruses

Spammers' imagination is constantly reaching new peaks. The disastrous earthquake that hit China also gave ideas to spammers, who started using headlines referring to the catastrophe in the email subjects. Their purpose - to persuade the users to access a "video" that in fact was an executable file that launched Peacomm. D, a Trojan, on the affected computer. The earthquake-Beijing Olympics connection was also used in order to determine users to unknowingly infect their systems.

The discovery of the Trojan was made by Symantec, a company that provides monthly reports on "the state of spam." Besides the already noted facts, Symantec's study also showed an email spam rate of 80%. This means that only 2 out of 10 emails are really sent by users' friends, co-workers or family, and have an original, valid content.

In June 2008, almost 45% of the spam messages were reported as coming from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. North America followed suit, with approximately 28%, while the Asia/Pacific, including Japan, region was responsible for 17% of the global spam. South American spammers were the "nicest" ones, with only a 10% rate of the total.

Symantec has also reviewed the spammers' favorite categories when it comes to wrapping their "product" into a package familiar to users. The product emails, the ones that advertise unsolicited items, are the most common, with 22% of the total spam. Financial spam, the one that offers financial tips and solutions, raised a total of 19%, followed by the Internet spam, with 18%. Leisure and adult content were the least popular between spammers, who obviously prefer to attack with the other weapons. Each of them was used for only 5% of the online delinquencies.

Other trends identified by the researchers were: the usage of personal data (the email address, as it was reported) in order to obtain illicit money from the person's contacts, the increase of mobile spam in Japan and spammers' return to older techniques, like the breaking-news headlines posted in the subject of the emails.