Spammers give India dubious honour

HYDERABAD:  The subprime crisis in the US may be giving jitters to stock markets the world over. But last week, the Wall Street faced another crisis - pump-and-dump attack.

When huge loads of spams made their way into the inboxes of gullible investors, the stock price of a Florida company called Prime Time Group Inc rose 57% in a single day.

When the share fell back to 7 cents, a group of spammers had made a killing.
Welcome to the world of pump-and-dump attack.

Here, investors are enticed to buy penny stocks at lower prices and the fraudsters make money by dumping those shares.

Though carried out mostly on US bourses, India has a dubious role in such incidents.
Says Prabhat Kumar Singh, director, Symantec Security Response Lab, India: “Apart from phisihing for identity theft, fraudsters from India are also using spam for a high degree of pump-and-dump attacks.”

In fact, India is fast gaining reputation as a spam originator, with 76% of all outgoing emails from the country being categorised as spam. It is currently ranked 18th among the top 25 spam-producing countries.

Globally, India is ranked 14th in hosting phishing websites, with Mumbai leading the cities with 30%.  Delhi follows with 29%. Over 60% of the top 50 malicious code reported in India contained threats to confidential information, while 84% of these threats allowed remote access, says the latest Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) from Symantec.

And worst, for every firewall, the spammers will come up with a new trick.
When security firms got wiser to the PDF spam in June, spammers resorted to file extensions like Excel, Zip and a new variant .FDF.

“While security vendors invested in optical code recognition software to recognise image spam, the latest PDF, Excel and ZIP attachments are more complex to analyse and cost more money,” Singh said.

Till May and June this year, spammers were using images or .JPG files to disguise their messages. But with security firms blocking such mails, spammers have begun using .PDF files.

At its peak in June, the image spam accounted for 50% of all spam. Today, it is down 5%, according to the Symantec’s monthly spam report.

PDF spam now accounts close to 8% of all spam.  Another internet security vendor, Secure Computing, said, in July, PDF accounted for 11% of all spam. This jumped to 17% in August, accounting for 88% of all email traffic.

Excel and Zip extensions are also increasing in use. Another common spam seen in June and July was the greeting card spam, which directs users to a link that downloads a Trojan onto the computer.

What is Spam
Sending massive amounts of email promotions or advertisement to people who have not asked for it qualifies as spam. Most often spam is sent out from email lists harvested from hacked address books, lists of discussion boards and groups, chat room and web sites. Just like junk faxes spam imposes a cost on users occupying space in email inboxes and on networks and servers.

Categories of Spam
* Product email attacks offering or advertising general goods and services.
*Adult email attacks 
* Financial email attacks that contain references or offers related to money, the stock market or other financial “opportunities.”
*Scams email attacks recognised as fraudulent, intentionally misguiding, or known to result in fraudulent activity on the part of the sender.
*Health email attacks offering or advertising health-related products and services.
* Fraud email attacks that appear to be from a well-known company, also known as “brand spoofing” or “phishing,”
* Leisure email attacks offering or advertising prizes, awards, or discounted leisure activities. 
* Internet email attacks specifically offering or advertising Internet or computer-related goods and services. 
* Political messages advertising a political candidate’s campaign, 
* Spiritual email attacks