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Wednesday 13th August 2008

July marks sharp rise for virus senders 12:43PM, Wednesday 13th August 2008

Last month saw emailed virus attacks reach new heights as a new record was set for the most virus-laden emails sent in 2008. Google said its Postini datacentres saw the biggest volume of email virus attacks so far in 2008, with a peak of nearly 10 million messages on 24th July.

Postini is a Google subsidiary that manages communication security and compliance for thousands of businesses worldwide. It claims to process over 1 billion messages per day.

According to the company, one of the most prominent attacks last month involved a spoofed UPS package-tracking link that was intended

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to lure recipients into clicking on it and downloading malware.

Another recent example was a bogus CNN newsletter, which was sent out by spammers. The newsletter included current news stories with numerous links embedded in the message. Although most of them were valid links to stories on the CNN website, some were replaced with malicious links.

Google claims many of the viruses its datacentre sees follow a similar format; emails with an embedded website link in the message, which is changed from what the link actually displays. However, it warned that new types of virus are already rearing their heads this August, with a large amount of messages being sent containing an encrypted .RAR attachment.

"The overall 2008 trend has been a decrease in the use of attachments, so this new virus is confirmation that spam doesn't follow trends for long," said Google in its enterprise blog.

Dawinderpal Sahota

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