Malicious Spam Spikes To 'Epic' Level 130
Trailrunner7 writes "There has been a huge spike in spam volume in the last few days, including a massive amount of malicious spam with infected attachments, and researchers say that levels of junk mail are now far higher than they were before the takedown of the notorious Spamit affiliate program last fall. The huge spike comes at a time when spam should, in fact, be dropping because of the takedown of the Rustock botnet, the Spamit network and other botnets. 'From the beginning of August, we have observed a huge surge of malicious spam which far exceeds anything we have seen over the past two years, including prior to the SpamIt takedown last October. The majority of the malicious spam comes from the Cutwail botnet, although Festi and Asprox are among the other contributors,' M86 researcher Rodel Mendrez said."
Re:unless (Score:2, Informative)
you think linux can't be hacked. that's so cute.
Older people (Score:2, Informative)
What is even more amazing is that with all the blocking and getting information out to users apparently spam is still profitable enough to keep on doing it. I have *never* responded to email spam but enough people must. Truly amazing.
I volunteer in a call center for consumer help.
Many older people (that call us, anyway) think of email offers or anything via email for that matter, on the same level as regular mail. In other words, if they get an offer in their email inbox, it has the same weight as something they get in their regular mail - is the best way I can explain it.
It's the same with the email spam from certain lobbying organizations that claim that their Social Security and Medicare are going to be cut and they need to RESPOND NOW and DONATE to stop this! - regardless of the merits of the claim.
If someone in an email says they "checked it out and it's TRUE" they believe them, too.
We need to tell our parents and grand parents to treat all unsolicited email as scams and even have serious doubts about emails from organizations that they do deal with.