The top 3 spots were determined by the sheer volume of messages that were tracked by our system:
3rd Place: It’s a tie between the “Lose Weight Instantly” PDFs and the flood of messages that originated from Chinese (.cn) domains. We detected over 900 different .cn domain names that were used in under a 12-hour period. Since those domains cost less than $1 US each, it’s a nice deal for them! Chinese domains are also for sale in North America via different providers, but you’ll pay anywhere between $6.95 to $49.99 US.
2nd Place: Goes to the random text spam like the following example. Because it contains no links or images there are different opinions about its purpose. Some think it’s being used for address harvesting, but I believe its an attempt to fool reputation systems by sending non-spammish content.
And the winner is…
Facebook: both the phishing and virus message types. The phishing version asked the recipient to click on a link to update his account information; the link was fake and redirected the user to various .co.uk domains. The virus version had an attached zip file that contained an infected .exe file.
Did you or anyone you know – get tricked by the Facebook scam or attempt to order medications from a bogus email / website? We want to hear from you!
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