December 2006

Spam e-mail bad in 2006, will get worse

If you think that most of the e-mail you get is spam, you are right. According to a report issued by MessageLabs, a provider of integrated messaging and Web security services, almost nine out of 10 e-mails sent in 2006 were spam.

“2006 was the year that spammers took the security industry by storm and showcased their new tactics and techniques for mass disruption. Now accounting for almost nine out of ten emails, spam has categorically shed its title of being a nuisance and is a perilous threat which all companies need to be protected against,” said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer.

“The next year will certainly bring more targeted and sophisticated attacks as the bad guys continue to sharpen their tools,” said Sunner.

The tools the “bad guys” use include spyware, adware, phishing, Trojans, viruses, and botnets. (Botnets retrieve information, such as cracked usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and other personal data stored in the web-browser’s auto-fill database.)

Top trends in 2006

During 2006, MessageLabs identified a number of trends:

• Spam: In 2006, the annual average spam rate was 86.2 percent, with botnets responsible for 80 percent of all spam in circulation.

• Viruses: With the exception of the Nyxem.E virus (otherwise known as MyWife.D, Blackworm, or Kama Sutra) in January 2006, no major virus outbreaks took place this year.

• Phishing: Phishing attacks grew this year with the 2006 average phishing rate reaching one in every 274.2 emails.

Predictions for 2007

The company foresees that electronic theats will worsen in 2007:

• Threats are expected to converge further over the course of 2007 — as e-mail security becomes tighter, the criminals will send more malicious emails with URL links that can slip under the security radar and wreak havoc on businesses.

• Virus rates will continue to fall, as they have become unnecessary in the creation of botnets.

• Ransomware, malicious software that will encrypt key files and documents using a secret key known only to the extortionist, will become increasingly threatening as the technology used by cyber criminals becomes more sophisticated and unbreakable.

• Spam will become more targeted throughout 2007.

• Botnets will be engineered to be resilient, allowing the criminals to maintain control of zombie computers more easily.

• Experts believe that the number of worms targeting Mac OS X will rise in the beginning of 2007.

You can view the company’s report in its entirety on the MessageLabs Web site at www.messagelabs.com/Threat_Watch.

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