Spammers Tire of E-mail

Good news: Spam is quickly disappearing from inboxes without any assistance from e-mail filters.

Bad news: Spammers now are rapidly infiltrating your private data through fraudulent "click-through" ads on your Web browser and attacks on your social networks.

Brian Krebs, a cybersecurity blogger and former Washington Post reporter, tells us -

Global spam volumes have fallen precipitously in the past two months, thanks largely to the cessation of junk e-mail from Rustock - until recently the world's most active spam botnet. But experts say the hackers behind Rustock have since shifted the botnet's resources toward other money-making activities, such as installing spyware and adware.

. . .since Christmas Day, the Rustock botnet has basically disappeared, as the amount of junk messages from it has fallen below 0.5 percent of all spam, according to researchers at Symantec's anti-spam unit MessageLabs. Turns out, other spam botnets also have been MIA since Christmas: "The Lethic botnet has been quiet since December 28, and the Xarvester botnet went silent on December 31," writes Symantec's Eric Park.

Botnets are masses of infected computers that hackers hijack to spam as many people as possible.

This week, Krebs asked Phil Hay, senior threat analyst with M86 Security Labs, about the reasons for the decline and received this response -

"Hello Brian. After talking to you today, we had another look at Rustock. While it was still quiet on the spam front, we did notice the malware performing what looks to be a pay-per-click fraud. When we doubled checked our older Rustock trace files from December, we also noticed the same sort of traffic. We missed it the first time because the sheer volume of spam-related traffic overshadowed the pay-per-click traffic. So Rustock was spamming and 'clicking' concurrently, but now is just clicking."

Meanwhile, computer security firm McAfee reports that the biggest 2011 cyber threats will include spammers who are more interested in directly stealing the data stored on your iPads and social networks than luring you to divulge it with fake e-mails:

In 2010 we saw some significant changes in how both malicious code and malicious links are distributed. This year ended with some of the lowest global email spam levels in years,. . . we anticipate a greater focus on botnets removing data from targeted machines and companies, rather than the common use of sending spam. Botnets will also engage in advanced datagathering functionality as well as focus more on targeting and abusing social networking.