Get ready for Xmas spam

2003-12-05 07:21

Paris - On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me...

Six e-mails for penis enlargement... five for cheap credit... four for Viagra... three for a dodgy online pharmacy... two for a get-rich-quick scam in Nigeria... and an electronic greetings card with a hidden virus that turned my computer into a spamming machine.

2003 will be the most spam-filled Christmas in what is already the spammiest year on record, experts say.

This year, hucksters and hackers are teaming up to ensure that your Christmas e-mail inbox will be stuffed with solicitations: some tedious, some offensive, some destructive - and all of it junk.

From now until the New Year, delete buttons, firewalls and spam filters will have to be in good shape.

"Spam, viruses and malicious code are set to peak in December," says filtering firm Clearswift. "The spammers will attempt to peddle seasonal products to employees full of the Christmas spirit."

Hidden nasties

Almost a quarter of the spam it stopped for its clients in October was associated with offers of cheap loans for people worried about the cost of Christmas, says Clearswift.

Joining the deluge will be legitimate online commerces, which will be e-mailing known customers to trail Christmas gifts such as books, CDs, household gadgets and DVD players.

And hidden in the overall flood could be some very nasty stuff for your computer.

For no longer do spammers use simple tools, such as "spambots" which crawl like spiders across the web to garner e-mail addresses, or software that automatically generates names to go with corporate, Yahoo! or Hotmail address.

Mailers are increasingly turning to hacking techniques, using viruses and worms to subvert machines.

A much-feared worm is the next generation of SoBig, which hijacks unprotected computers with an open connection to the internet, turning these machines into a potential spam factory that can crank out unsolicited e-mail by the bucket-load.

"We are seeing spikes in the level of spam almost week on week," Mark Sunner, chief technology officer of MessageLabs, a US-British spam-filtering firm, said.

Spam stations

"We have seen an almost seven percent increase in the last two weeks, which is very, very dramatic. Sixty percent of the total comes from computers that have been turned into spam stations, a sign that spammers are turning to viral techniques as a delivering mechanism."

The outlook is grim, given that 2003 could already be called the Year of Spam.

Figures given by filter companies vary because they are hired by corporations in different sectors of the economy to snare spam before it reaches employees.

But the consensus is that spam accounts these days for more than half of e-mail traffic on the internet, and has doubled in 2003.

The problem has become so bad that the European Union and United States this year approved tough laws to punish individuals and firms which send unwanted mail.

- AFP