World Cup continues to drive spam

The World Cup is continuing to play a major role in global spam loads, according to Symantec.

The company said in its monthly MessageLabs Intelligence report that throughout the month the football tournament had been popular not only for pushing spam related to the event, but also for getting unrelated spam messages through filters.

Researchers have for weeks been warning that the event would be a popular lure for scams and malware attacks as cybercriminals look to cash in on interest over the tournament.

According to Symantec, the World Cup is not only popular for scams, but is also useful for tempting users to open other types of spam as well. The company said that subject lines relating to the World Cup were amongst the most popular for pharmaceutical spam messages.

"While spammers often continue to re-send the same spam campaigns, they include the latest news headlines either in the subject line or somewhere in the body to grab the attention of the recipient and increase the likelihood of the message being opened," the company said in the report.

"Such campaigns tend be large in volume, and the headlines are almost certainly gathered automatically, using highly specialised spam tools that collect the latest news headlines from topical websites across the internet."

Additionally, World Cup text was being used by spammers to avoid spam filters. By placing lines of text related to the tournaments within the body of a message in order to confuse signature-based filters that check for message content.

Despite the uptake in World Cup spam, the company found that as a whole spam levels dropped by 0.9 percent over May. Hungary was reported as the most-spammed country, with 94 per cent of all e-mail coming from spam.