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Published on: 8/23/2007
Last Visited: 11/29/2007
"We have noticed overnight a strong up-tick in the volume of confirmation spam from 18 percent of all spam yesterday to 35 percent," said Bradley Anstis, director of product management at United Kingdom-based Marshal, in an interview with eWEEK.
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Anstis noted the new "confirmation spam" outbreak has been launched by the same group that launched the Hot Pictures spam campaign earlier in the week.Though in the past, spam campaigns such as the greeting card campaign would last for weeks at a time, spammers are now modifying or launching new spam campaigns almost daily, he said.
"They are trying to stay one or two steps ahead of the security companies.It typically takes a lot longer for a security company to react to a new threat than it takes for them to release," he said."In this case, the Storm Trojan in all its guises is getting a lot of press, e-card spam, PDF spam, etc., so users are quite well versed.
They have to try new techniques so that they can continue infecting PCs and expanding their Botnets.With the malicious code they are using to infect people morphing so often and also other clever techniques like refusing to launch in virtual sessions, it is making it ever harder to track and detect."
Anstis advised anyone who receives a message like this from a person they do not know, or have not heard from for a long time, to delete it without opening it.