Spam is Up - Thank Better Botnet Design & Economics 101
I noted in an article that botnets are becoming more robust with distributed command and control structures. This seems to be contributing in an upsurge in spam and especially phishing. Gregg Keizer's article forecasting trends in spam for 2007 noted (quoting Paul Wood, senior analyst with MessageLabs):
"As a proportion of the traffic in malicious e-mail, phishing now accounts for 68.6% of the total." At the beginning of 2006, the rate was only 10.6%. Attackers have ditched virus and worm development and replaced that with increasingly sophisticated phishing campaigns, some of which are extremely targeted. "People who were creating viruses and Trojans are shifting to phishing. They're using very personal information, such as mail codes of zip codes or addresses, which make the phish much more compelling."
Again, like a recent post on ransomware argued, economics is driving cybercrime. Bruce Schneier is concerned about hyping cybercrime (and I agree) but once the market forces come into play it is hard to imagine that the problem will not get worse.
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