Cyber crooks latch on Haiti quake buzz

By Enterprise Innovation Editors | Feb 19, 2010

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Cybercriminals are leaving no stones unturned as more of their breed continue to latch on every possible issue gathering online buzz, never mind that it could be as devastating and catastrophic as the recent earthquake that hit the South American country of Haiti.

With 419-Nigerian spam becoming more prevalent again, the total of scam and phishing messages came in at 21 percent of all spam, which is the highest level recorded since the inception of this report in 2007.

Other trends from Symantec’s February 2010 State of Spam and Phishing Report include:

• Banks get phished - 79% of phishing attacks in January were aimed at the financial sector
• CNNIC Clamps Down - Spam messages with .cn domain URL dropped by more than half in January, compared to December In early January, following the announcement by China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) to suspend new overseas .cn domain registrations. CNNIC stated that this suspension will allow them to implement a better procedure to verify registrant information from overseas registrations. This was a follow-up action to a related move in mid-December that required registrants to submit additional paperwork.
• Online pharmacy spammers change subject line: In January 2010, the top ten subject lines used by spammers were dominated by a mixture of Nigerian- type (419) and online pharmacy spam. It is interesting to see that spammers have changed their tactics regarding online pharmacy spam. Subject lines such as “Must-Know Rules Of Better Shopping” and “You Must Know About This Promotion” are more vague than “RE: SALE 70% OFF on Pfizer.” Other misleading subject lines such as “Confirmation Mail” and “Special Ticket Receipt” were also used for online pharmacy spam messages.
• Adult phishing scams: Symantec observed a new trend in adult oriented phishing. The phishing site states that the end user can obtain free pornography after logging in or signing up. These offers tempt users into entering their credentials in the hopes of obtaining pornography. Upon entering login credentials, the site redirects to a pornographic website that then leads to a fake antivirus web-site containing malicious code. 92 percent of adult phishing scams were on social networking sites, with the remainder on information services brand. The phishing sites were created using free webhosting services.