By ChannelTimes Staff
Mumbai, Apr 29, 2008 1816 hrs IST

Cyberoam, a division of Elitecore Technologies, has announced that its Q1 2008 email threat trend report, prepared in collaboration with partner Commtouch, has revealed that malware distributors and spammers are now hiding their unwanted messages within legitimate-appearing websites and messages. According to Cyberoam's report, these tactics include pharma spam camouflaged as Hotmail welcome letters, blogspot redirects to malware sites, hidden malware sites in search result URLs, hosted spam images on Flickr accounts and spear-phishing scams using Google and Yahoo! Calendar standards. All of these methods deploy social and psychological engineering strategies to take advantage of user trust and behavior. On average, more than 350,000 zombies were newly activated each day to facilitate this activity. The company communique informs, social engineering approaches targeting user behavior patterns had also seen a steep rise during Q4 2007, where spammers launched attacks deploying easy cash and discounted gift scams. Existing security solutions have been unable to block the new formats, resulting in an alarming rise in spam levels reaching 94% of all email at its peak to date in 2008. It further states, during this period, spam and malware writers leveraged current affairs to keep their messages relevant. When the U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates in late January in response to the mortgage crisis, millions of U.S. mortgages became eligible for refinancing. Spammers capitalized and pumped out immense quantities of mortgage refinancing spam, which jumped from 2% to 10% of all spam in this quarter. Consequently, the rise in mortgage spam delayed or prevented email correspondence between banks and their customers -as technologies could not differentiate between valid mortgage-related mail and the spam. The report also reveales that holidays continued to be a vehicle for spam, with outbreaks in honor of Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day and April Fool's Day. Most Anti-spam solutions were ineffective, as blocking emails leveraging holiday-themed keywords often resulted in false positives. Contextually, Cyberoam provides a multi-layered defense against such attacks. The company claims to be an innovator of identity-based Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions. Through their service, a Commtouch RPD based Anti-spam engine filters all mail. Cyberoam also features content filtering protection by adding URLs in custom categories, to block the spread of the threat. Additionally, Cyberoam features Anti-virus protection to block malware downloads. Related Links Fortinet Leads in UTM Revenue for 2007 Syndicate Bank Selects Fortinet UTM Solution