A recent phishing campaign targeting customers of several major U.S. banks was powered by text messages directing recipients to call hacked phone lines at Holiday Inn locations in the south. Such attacks are not new, but this one is a timely reminder that phishers increasingly are using lures blasted out via SMS as more banks turn to text messaging to communicate with customers about account activity.
Cynical security experts often dismiss anti-spam activists as grumpy idealists with a singular, Sisyphean obsession. The cynics question if it’s really worth all that time and effort to complain to ISPs and hosting providers about customers that are sending junk email? Well, according to at least one underground service designed for spammers seeking to avoid anti-spam activists, the answer is a resounding “yes!”
Last week, National Public Radio aired a story on my Pharma Wars series, which chronicles an epic battle between men who ran two competing cybercrime empires that used spam to pimp online pharmacy sites. As I was working with the NPR reporter on the story, I was struck by how much spam has decreased over the past couple of years. Below is a graphic that’s based on spam data collected by Symantec’s MessageLabs. It shows that global spam volumes fell and spiked fairly regularly, from highs of 6 trillion messages sent per month to just below 1 trillion. I produced this graph based on Symantec’s raw spam data.
