Commtouch: Spammers Used Katrina To Get Attention
Wednesday, 14 September 2005 20:37 EST
In August, Commtouch's Spam detection center identified more than 250 examples of with subject lines using the words "hurricane" and "katrina".
nternet Spam and virus detection solutions developer Commtouch Software Ltd. (Nasdaq: CTCH) today announced spam trends and statistics for the month of August.
The announcement was based on data from the Commtouch Spam detection center, which analyzed over 1.5 billion spam messages in the month of August 2005.
"Our analysis shows that spammers used Katrina to attract and hold recipients' interest. Typically, the subject of the e-mail relates to hurricane related news, while the body of the message has nothing to do with the hurricane that devastated Louisiana," said Commtouch director of product marketing Oren Drori.
During a monitoring experiment of less than five hours, the Commtouch Spam detection center identified more than 250 examples of such spam outbreaks, with subject lines such as:
* "today's headlines: hurricane katrina slams into gulf coast; dozens are dead"
* "travelnewsletter - katrina affects cruise itineraries. stay safe!"
* "hurricane katrina update - nationwide storm survey"
* "Instantly track Katrina's progress john"
In other examples, variations on the words "Katrina" and "Hurricane" were used in multiple ways within the subjects of spam. The objective was to circumvent naive spam filters such as Bayesian filters, which tend to white list messages by positive keywords. Examples (with spelling and mistypes from the original messages) included:
* "Claim your stock car racing gift Katrina"
* "El 'Katrina' podria costarle a las aseguradoras mas de 20.000 millones"
* "Enter now for a complimentary trip to Maui Katrina"
* "Get an overnight $1500 cash advance for Katrina"
* "Katrina win a $50,000 scholarship"
* "Sexy hottie Katrina strips down"
While some spam may have masqueraded as messages relating to Katrina, the true content of August 2005 remained similar to that of previous months. The list was headed once again by pharmaceuticals (29.15%), financing schemes (20.95%) and sex enhancers (14.19%).
The Commtouch Spam detection center identified 27,664,737 new spam outbreaks in August 2005, averaging 922,158 outbreaks per day. This represents a slight decrease from July 2005, during which 33,977,674 spam outbreaks were detected. During the period July-August 2005, there were 36% more spam outbreaks than during the same period in 2004.
Spammers continue to abuse the reputation of the leading e-mail service providers, forging messages so they appear to be sent from domains such as Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. The most popular domains used as "senders" in August 2005 were yahoo.com & yahoogroups.com with 2.08% of false addresses; hotmail.com -- 1.35%; aol.com -- 0.55%; gmail.com -- 0.52%; msn.com -- 0.30%; sympatico.ca -- 0.26%; netscape.net -- 0.25%; ebay.com -- 0.22%; comcast.net -- 0.22%; fusemail.com -- 0.20%; and ebay.de 0.19%.
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