Looking at Swine Flu Spam Globally

Following up on Chris Barton’s excellent blog the other day on swine flu spam, we wanted to take a closer look at the numbers…..

Many people may not realize that the words “swine” and “flu” had really not been seen in spam before this past weekend and almost certainly not together in the same subject line, so we kinda started there. Using our Trusted Source technology and intel I was able to pull the following chart on the sheer growth in the words “swine” and “flu” when used just as a subject for the last several days:

Bear in mind that is NOT daily volume growth but rather the growth in its use as a subject.

From the beginning of the campaigns we have seen it generated from all over the world, not really a surprise when one considers the global nature of botnets and spam anyway but the country breakdown is interesting to look at. Seems that Brazil, the United States and Germany are the biggest producers/sources at the moment:

No safe country from spammers eh? When you consider that on any given day there is between 80 to 170 billion email messages with 78 to 90 percent of that number being spam, sending with the subject of “swine flu” gives these criminals a high chance of success due to the media attention the subject is already getting. Social engineering is one of the most successful and dangerous tools at the spammers disposal and it is very hard to protect against.

We have also seen sites with the words “swine” and “flu” pushing malware as well. In this case its a redirect to a Russian-based site that requires our old friend the fake codec be installed to view the movie:

Malware writers, spammers and scammers are low lives. They will use any high media event or high impact news story to push their wares including the sickness and misery of others. Stay vigilant and stay safe. Should you need credible information on the influenza pandemic then go to The World Health Organization website.