If you're feeling swamped in unsolicited e-mail, you're not alone. Enterprise security vendor Secure Computing this week reported spam increases 53 percent above July's daily average and 70 percent above June's average. That's not, however, a record. The current level of spam is equivalent to those reported during December 2006.
Reasons for the August bump in spam are varied. One, there's been a resurgence of the Storm worm, which is known to relay spam.
Two, enterprise security companies are seeing a higher level of attachment-based spam. In addition to the usual suspects of PDF and Excel attachments, security vendor McAfee reports the first sighting of FDF-based spam. FDF is the format used by Adobe to export data from PDF form fields.
Finally, U.K. antivirus vendor Sophos reported last week seeing an increase in what are called pump-and-dump stock scams. The latest victim, Prime Time Group, which has interests in the retail oil and gas, convenience stores and automotive services, has opened a Non Objecting Beneficial Owners list (NOBO list) investigation in an attempt to find the parties responsible.
- prev
- 1
- next
