Symantec Corp. has announced the findings of its January Symantec Intelligence Report, which shows that spammers are using holidays and major events to make their mail more appealing.
 
Symantec Intelligence has seen more than 10,000 unique domain names compromised with a redirect script written in PHP that contains a reference to the New Year in the file name.  These redirect scripts were hosted on compromised Web sites and links to these were included in spam emails, which were subsequently blocked by Symantec.cloud.
 
To further entice recipients to open their messages, spammers used additional social engineering techniques by including parameters in the URL to suggest that the destination is a social networking site.
 
Symantec Intelligence expects to see spammers taking advantage of other upcoming calendar events, including the fast-approaching Valentine's Day.
 
“We also expect to see plenty of spam and malware taking advantage of some of the major upcoming sporting events this year. We are already seeing references to the Summer Olympics in London as part of 419 or advance fee fraud messages,” said Paul Wood, senior intelligence analyst, Symantec. “By relating their mails to widely-celebrated holidays and current events with global interest, spammers and malware authors can (at first glance at least) make their messages more interesting, and increase the chance of recipients visiting spam Web sites or becoming infected,” Wood said.
 
Symantec said in January 2012, the global ratio of spam in email traffic rose by 1.3 percentage points since December 2011, to 69.0 percent, or in 1.45 emails. This follows a more noticeable drop in December when spam fell by 2.8 percentage points to 67.7 percent. The recent increase means that spam has almost returned to the same level as in November 2011. Following a  similar trend, Singapore’s ratio of spam in email traffic increased by 0.9 percentage points in December 2011, to 66.7 percent.

Saudi Arabia became the most spammed geography in January, with a spam rate of 75.5 percent. China was the second most-spammed with 75.0 percent of email traffic blocked as spam. In Hong Kong, 67.5 percent of email was blocked as spam and 66.7 percent in Singapore, compared with 65.6 percent in Japan.

The Education sector became the most spammed industry sector in January, with a spam rate of 71.0 percent. Meanwhile, the public sector remained the most targeted by phishing activity in January, with one in 99.1 emails comprising a phishing attack.