Symantec says instances of image spam seem to be declining. But in the big picture, it’s probably just being delivered differently.
That, according to the company’s latest State of Spam report, details of which are available in the Symantec Security Response blog. Image spam, identified as one of the more pervasive forms of unwanted messages, reached a low in July from its peak in January, Symantec says in the report.
That said, nobody should be under the illusion that image spam is about to go the way of the dinosaur.
“Though still steadily declining, what we’ve come to think of as image spam has not gone away,” Symantec Security Response’s “The preferred delivery method of this spam type is now .pdf, which emerged in June.”
She said Symantec is seeing .pdf spam ranging between 2-8% of all spam. July also saw the emergence of yet more tactics focused on spamming images. These tactics include the use of .xls and .zip files.
Meanwhile, greeting card spam seems to be on the rise, with links to a variety of malware. “More than 250 million Symantec customers were targeted with these message types,” Conley wrote. “Around the Fourth of July a particularly large outbreak was seen and blogged on. The content of the greeting cards consists of an exposed IP address in most cases, which is a very good indicator that the card is not genuinely good. The exposed IP address links were downloading Trojans onto computers.”
