Spammers Attempt to Camouflage Reputation Says Commtouch Trend Report

Sunnyvale, Calif  - New camouflage tactics spammers use to cloak their bad reputations enable malware and unwanted messages to infiltrate inboxes, according to a new report by Commtouch® (Nasdaq: CTCH).

Highlights of the report include:

• Spam levels throughout the third quarter averaged 77%, as in the previous quarter, ranging from a low of 61% to a peak of 94% of all email
• Legitimate sites and senders were used by spammers to cloak their illicit activity, including sites like Microsoft’s Live.com
• Over half of zombies/bots change their IP address daily
• Germany has the fastest rate of zombie IP address turnover, at approximately 79% per day; China is a close second at 78% turnover per day
• Malware masqueraded as legitimate newsletters such as CNN Daily Top 10 or IE7 Browser updates
• New spam tactics during the quarter included: links to Flash (.swf) files, ASCII art spam, and hidden Bayesian poisoning text combined with HTML tricks

“Internet Service Providers and enterprises are implementing a broad range of filtering tactics, including filtering based on sender reputation, which in turn impact how spammers and malware distributors can reach their goal of penetrating inboxes,” said Amir Lev, chief technology officer of Commtouch.

“The growing trend is for spammers to adopt the good reputation built up by other sites and senders in order to bypass reputation-based email filters. They accomplish this in a number of ways, including stealing legitimate email senders’ credentials, or compromising email account enrollment processes and automatically registering thousands of free email accounts. This puts ISPs in the uncomfortable position of becoming the source of outbound spam rather than just trying to protect their subscribers from receiving spam.”

Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection™ and GlobalView™ technologies identify and blocks email threats, including increasingly malicious malware and phishing outbreaks. Commtouch messaging security technologies were recently awarded the 2008 European Messaging Security Technology Innovation of the Year Award by analyst firm Frost & Sullivan.

More details, including samples of spam and malware messages, are available in the Commtouch Q3 2008 Email Threats Trend Report, available from Commtouch Labs at:

NOTE:

Reported global spam levels are based on Internet email traffic as measured from unfiltered data streams, not including internal corporate traffic. Therefore global spam levels will differ from the quantities reaching end user inboxes, due to several possible layers of filtering at the ISP level.

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