Spammers Following News and Trends

Always seeking to perfect their con, spammers are paying more attention to news and trends to better dupe their marks, reports PC Magazine.

Spammers have increased the number of finance-related email campaigns and attacks offering financial products, lottery scams, loans and jobs, according to [January's MessageLabs] report.

At the same time, they have cut back on replica watch and other well-known spamming topics and focused on weight loss products and bargain designer clothes in increased volumes.

Mark Sunner, chief security analyst at MessageLabs, warns "Spammers are proving more business-minded and time-sensitive than ever, seeking to exploit the most common and current weaknesses from New Year weight loss hopes to fears about the credit crunch."

Cybercriminals are also perfecting a new technique called search engine spam. The technique embeds a link constructed from a search engine query into an email, which when clicked on, transports the user to an erroneous Web site.

PC Magazine reports anti-spamming solutions have a hard time detecting these links because they would have to block links to such popular and legitimate search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Search engine spam accounted for 17 percent of all spam in January, according to MessageLabs.