Malicious Email Up

The latest report from Sophos indicates that 8x more malicious email attachments were spammed in Q3 of 2008.

The quarterly report from Sophos looks at spam trends. For the July – September 2008 time span, the report indicates that there was a rise in the proportion of spam emails sent with malicious attachments, as well as an increase in social engineering techniques in spam messages.

The report indicates that 1 in every 416 email messages contained a dangerous attachment. This was an 8 fold increase compared to Q2. Most of the increase can be attributed to several large-scale malware attacks, including one with was disguised as an iPhone arcade game with a penguin character. Most of the attacks were still for Windows-based users, and the US led the way as the top country responsible for relaying spam across the globe.

In addition to malware sent via email attachments, malicious links were designed to prey upon user curiosity. This type of social engineering included “breaking news alerts”. Other new methods were explored, including spam using Facebook and Twitter.

Here is a video from Sophos about how one large social engineering campaign worked:

Also of high importance in the news right now is a report that security researchers have found a way to crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard that’s used to protect data on many wireless networks. This is worrying news, which you can read about more here.

image: microsoft clipart