Holiday Spam, Botnets And Conficker - November Security Threats Summarized

The monthly spam report published by security vendor AppRiver showed some interesting patterns, and the Conficker virus hit the Internet to celebrate its anniversary. Other highlights included:

• Zeus, Bredo and Pushdo made frequent appearances, illustrating strange similarities that are leading many experts to believe that they are controlled, or at least written, by the same group.
• Conficker made it's one year anniversary appearance with a "helpful" email pretending to be from Microsoft.
• Zeus, or Zbot for short, was responsible for three large events. The first provided emails pretending to be from Verizon and Vodafone telling the recipient their "credit balance is over the limit." The second provided emails telling the recipient the mailbox has been deactivated. The third provided the recipient with a faulty email from a "friend" that said some "jerk" posted your pictures online. When clicking on the link to see the purported pictures, you instead download the Zeus Trojan.
• The holiday shopping season is almost upon us, and although spam is popular throughout the year, fake emails promoting holiday products and discounts come out in full force. This is an especially popular time for rookies to take a stab at spam.

VARs can access the full report at this link: http://www.appriver.com/reports/pdf/DecemberSpamReport2009%20(2).pdf.

SOURCE: AppRiver