Spam and cyberscams follow techniques of legitimate business
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Cybercriminals such as the botnet operators who unleash spam and malware increasingly borrow techniques from legitimate businesses to make their attacks more effective, according to the mid-year web security report from Cisco.
Driven by the bottom line, cybercriminals have been forming partnerships with one another to help make their illegal activities more lucrative. Botnet owners are renting out their networks of compromised PCs, effectively using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to spread spam and malware.
"What is striking in our latest findings is how, in addition to using their technical skills to cast a wide net and avoid detection, these criminals are also demonstrating some strong business acumen," said
Patrick Peterson, Cisco fellow and chief security researcher.
Other tactics of spammers include what Cisco calls "spamdexing," or the use of Blackhat SEO for drawing web traffic to compromised websites. By loading up sites with keywords or search terms, cybercriminals get their hacked sites higher up in search engine rankings.
Traditional spam is now being rivaled by SMS spam on mobile devices. Cisco describes the rapidly growing mobile device audience as a "new frontier for fraud irresistible to criminals," with a field of some 4.1 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide.
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