“Jackson Still Life”, “Obama condemned the Pope”. That part of the subject that used to deceive the people through infected email.
Most, spam spread by “riding” on the topics of hot news, as reported in McAfee’s “Threat Report Q4 (PDF)” which was released in mid-February. The case of Air France plane crash and death of Michael Jackson in June 2009 continue to be a top theme for the email spammers during the year 2009, noted McAfee. Swine influenza (swine flu) also have contributed to the spread of malware to exploit the user.
Meanwhile, hacktivism (cyberattack political background) increased in the year 2009. In October of that year, the government of Poland reported experiencing an attack from Russia. Then the next interval of two months, namely December, a group calling itself the Army Cyber attack Iran to employees Twitter, Microblogging site that was up leaves.
Still in the same month, an email from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK are also affected by a hacker attack about two weeks before the ongoing climate conference in Copenhagen. Based on these events, some people believe that the attack launched by Russian hackers are hired to ward off global warming.
For the category of the world, the United States (U.S.) holds the title as largest spam producer. Followed by Brazil and India. Whereas most populous country in the world, China managed to bypass the United States and accused the suppliers of successful zombie botnet to infect computers to spread spam. “China has become a giant zombie with relying on SQL injection attacks,” explained Mike Gallagher (Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of McAfee Labs) in a statement.
Actually, the amount of spam last year had dropped in the fourth quarter by 24 percent over the third quarter. The volume of junk email (junk) in the whole world is still at an average amount of 135.5 billion per day. In conclusion, spammers still will rely on the news especially tragedy to trap victims.