Antivirus and security company BitDefender has come up with its annual top ten spam list, and it might be a surprise to learn that the penny stock, pump and dump scam, which seemed to go out of vogue, returned with a vengeance to claim the top spot. According to company analysts, “stock spam was mostly attachment-based, with image attachments dominating the first half of the year and “experimental” waves of mp3 and PDF spam filling up inboxes in the second half. In the last few months, obfuscated text-only penny stock spam also made a re-appearance.” Although phishing was perhaps less prominent than expected, it was decidedly more dangerous to consumers. “The most common type of phishing spam is based on threats to terminate the account being phished, while a second common variation is to ask a customer to enter their account info to “update the banking security app”. The templates used to create these e-mails were generally very well-crafted and extremely similar to the web forms used by the target banks, although spelling mistakes and a web address different from that of the original bank were still apparent in many cases.” The company’s predictions regarding phishing aren’t good. They expect spammers to find ways around filters and SSL authentication, and expect more banks to be targeted. So what is BitDefender’s Top Ten for 2007?
- Penny stocks spam
2. Drug spam
3. Pornography
4. Replica watches
5. Loans
6. Phishing spam
7. Pirated software
8. Fake job ads
9. Dating site spam
10. Fake diplomas
