Monday, 11 September 2006

Spam Campaigns Spike By 72% In August, Says McAfee

The latest statistics unveiled by McAfee, related to spam campaigns, indicate an alarming trend for the month of August 2006. Two of the many statistics McAfee anti-spam researchers monitor are the duration of spam campaigns and the number of unique URL addresses used by spammers in campaigns over a given period. Current trend data indicates that the major spam campaigns are, on average, cycling through 72 percent more domains per hour than just one month ago.

Spam messages usually contain URLs that link to Web sites where users can purchase items ranging from discounted products and medicines to other services. Spammers tend to use multiple URLs in their campaigns as way of surpassing anti-spam defenses, however they have recently stepped up their activity, using many more URLs than usual and cycling through them faster as well.

"It's a cat and mouse game where spammers try to change their URLs faster than the anti-spam companies can react," said Guy Roberts, development manager at McAfee, Inc. "If it takes traditional blacklists fifteen to twenty minutes to block a site, then that’s how fast the spammers need to change their URLs. Since domains cost only USD 6 per registration, the spammer is spending less than USD 100 for four hours of advertising."