SurfControl: Top email security threats Q1

Anti-virus vendor SurfControl has released its findings into the major email security threats of the last quarter.

SurfControl said in the first quarter of 2006, spam had shown consistent growth of 16 percent month over month.

The increase is partly attributed to Russia and China, where spam, phishing and fraud could be more generic. Online criminals were more likely to use training courses, shopping and forum sites to gain entry to victims, said SurfControl.

There was significant rise in the amount of pharmaceutical and finance-related spam, together representing 80 percent of spam volume.

Stock tip embedded spam is still the most prevalent type of spam, claiming 40 percent of all financial spam, with 1,200,000 instances discovered in March, the company said.

SurfControl found spammers increased the use of free redirection services to score legitimate points against domain reputation technology.

In South America, and other regions, free hosts, such as AOL, were being used by spammers to host popular malicious executables and keyloggers.

There was also an increase in remote foreign domain extensions, such as .cc, .sh, .in. These extensions increased potential vulnerabilities because all iterations of these domains may not be immediately or easily available globally in WHOIS directories, said SurfControl.