(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As the holiday season begins, many will take to the Internet to shop online and research products, however, botnets such as Cutwail, Rustock and Donbot are using upcoming holiday cheer to bolster their latest spam runs.
According to hosted services provider Symantec (www.symantec.com) in its October 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, holiday spam currently accounts for approximately 2 percent of all spam. More than two billion Thanksgiving or Christmas-themed spam emails are projected to be in circulation globally each day, including those from the Cutwail botnet that uses it to sell replica watches.
“As is typical with spammers this time of year, we are seeing them try to capitalize on the holiday season,” MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst Paul Wood said in a statement. “Although they may be a bit overzealous, spamming is a numbers game and the spammers have certainly succeeded with volume thus far. Perhaps their early-bird approach is an attempt to compete with the other botnets and get in early to maximize their chances of success.”
Secondary holidays, Halloween and Valentine’s Day are also being used in phishing attacks.
The majority of Halloween spam is from the Rustock and Donbot botnets and links to pharmaceutical or medical spam sites. Only 0.5 percent of spam is currently tied to Halloween, MessageLabs Intelligence has been seeing that figure increase as the holiday approaches this week, and it expects approximately 500 million Halloween-themed spam emails to be in circulation worldwide.
More than 4 months away, MessageLabs Intelligence has already started to see the first runs of Valentine’s Day spam. These are being sent from the Cutwail and Rustock botnets, and tend to be pharmaceutical and medical related spam.
While Thanksgiving and Halloween are largely the territory of North America, the upcoming 2010 World Cup, which might as well be considered a holiday for much of the rest of the world, is another major theme for spam. Next summer’s soccer games in South Africa has already spawned a small number of spam messages relating to the event, which are mainly advance-fee fraud or 419-style scams, some including images of Nelson Mandela and the official FIFA logo.
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