Spam News

More spam and malicious links out there

Thursday, January 22, 2009

In the past six months, approximately 84 percent of emails were spam with a high majority of the messages containing malicious links, according to a new report. This is a 3 percent rise from the previous report.

The bi-annual research report State of Internet Security was released by Websense yesterday and appeared to show cybercriminals have been successful getting past security networks.

Aside from numbers showing an increase in spam emails, the report also found 70 percent of the top 100 most popular websites either "hosted malicious content or contained a masked redirect to lure unsuspecting victims from legitimate sites."

Most of the targeted websites were search engines and social networking sites, which seems to be a new favorite security-breaking conduit for cybercriminals. Last year it was reported hackers had significant success cracking CAPTCHA security measures, which allowed them to infiltrate sites like Facebook to spread malware.

This ability to crack into social networks may account for the 46 percent rise in the number of malicious websites from January 1st, 2008, according to the report. Of those sites, 39 percent of them contained data-stealing code.