Spammers Use Holidays To Make Mail More Appealing, Says Symantec

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 27 (Bernama)-- A report by Symantec Corp shows that spammers are using holidays and major events to make their mail more appealing. Symantec said its January Symantec Intelligence Report 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. PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. "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," it said in a statement Thursday. To further entice recipients to open their messages, it said spammers used additional social engineering techniques by including parameters in the uniform resource locator to suggest that the destination is a social networking site. "We expect to see spammers taking advantage of other "calendar events" with one of the most important having been the Chinese New Year celebration, as well as the fast-approaching Valentine's Day," Symantec said. Symantec Senior intelligence analyst Paul Wood said more spam and malware would also take 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," he added. Wood said in December last year, global spam levels dropped, but in January gradually returned to similar levels as in November, which is still lower than the 2011 average. Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organisations secure and manage their information-driven world. --BERNAMA