E-Mail Spam Morphs in First Half of 2008

BitDefender released the results of its spam and phishing survey from January through June 2008, last year’s highly advertised stock spam dropped from 25% to just 2%, while the formerly intrusive image spam continued its descending trend.

In terms of media and techniques, the most notable trend the analysts uncovered concerns the revival of the text-based spam which reached 70%this year, compared to 20% for the same period of 2007. Image spam continued its decline and dropped to 3%, compared to 60% last year.

“Plain text continues to be the most prolific medium for e-mail spam distribution, especially due to its simplicity, reduced size and extreme versatility”, said Andra Miloiu, BitDefender Spam Analyst.

Text-based spam still appeals to automated scripts for word scrambling, rephrasing or (synonymic) substitution, while image spam usually deploys obfuscated content. Other types of spam, such as e-mails bearing PDF attachments, audio and video files, etc., decreased in popularity, accounting for 10-15% of e-threats.

In the first half of 2008, e-mail spam’s content lost its emphasis on stock options, while spam media changes – dominated in the last half of 2007 by various formats of image and audio stock spam – reverted back to non-obfuscated and identical text-based message templates.

Find out more about the Top 10 of most advocated content through e-mail spam.