A horribly written spam e-mail was discovered by Sophos, a developer and vendor of security software and hardware, early Sunday morning.

With a newly discovered spam messages including a dangerous malware infection, identified as Mal/Dropper-PQ, came the following proposition:

Dear Sir
I am able to complete the funds transfer late night
$1,850 was sent via western union with MTCN VALUE 754 061 9934
Copies of the payment is being attached and sent to the attorney
I anticipate further correspondent as regards
Peter

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An astounding amount of about 90.4% of all e-mail messages is considered to be spam.

According to MessageLabs, a security research firm, spam levels have remained the same since the month of May which is said to be 90% of all email traffic for the month of June. The majority of the spam messages are a result of botnets which accounts for about 83% of the spam messages. The remainder portion of spam remains to be sourced from compromised mail servers or hacked webmail accounts.

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The history of spamming will tell us that popular stories or hot-off-the-press news is gold for spammers.

In recent activities discovered by security researchers, spammers are using the popular Iran election stores and news about Apple’s newest iPhone 3.0 software or iPhone 3GS release to flood Twitter with misleading tweets.

No doubt that Twitter and the iPhone are some of the most talked about “things” of this year. Many times cyber criminals will uses these “popular items” to their advantage and that is just what they are doing.

Spammers are sending out a slew of Twitter messages that say things like, “iPhone OS 3.0 Just Launched. Here are 20 Things To Do With It”. In addition, Twitter messages similar to this, are being posted by hacked Twitter accounts. The messages are apparently popping up when the popular search terms related to the iPhone is entered. Then they message may redirect you to a malicious site that may ultimately prompt the download of a .Zip file that contains malware.

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There has been an increase in the number of Casino related spam messages designed to infect computers with a malicious downloader application.

Just in the past few days, security researchers have noticed a high volume of Casino related spam emails that are designed to trick computer users into subscribing or joining Casino websites. After the user joins the Casino site they are asked to download an executable program that is identified as RoyalClubCasino.exe, which is recognized as a malicious file by many antivirus and antispyware detection tools.

The emails identified as spam messages related to Casinos, use attractive subjects promising money to the computer user if they play an online Casino game. Included in the spam email messages are links to various websites that may be associated with the creators of this scam.

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Spammers are seeking an interest in exploiting the Swine Flu epidemic to extend offers for fake pharmaceuticals.

According to Dave Marcus, director of security research at McAfee Inc., the number of spam messages related to Swine Flu has been spreading rapidly accounting for about 2% of all spam messages today. Spam message with the subject lines, “Madonna caught swine flu!” and “First US swine flu victims!”, have increased just recently. Security researchers believe that spammers are using related spam messages to lead users to online drug sites or to harvest credit card numbers from gullible consumers.

The swine flu, or the newest influenza strain, has been making headlines since last week. Sophos Labs has also witnessed an influx of spam campaigns that includes messages containing a link that redirects users to a Canadian Pharmacy site.

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What would you do with an email message that had “CNN.com Daily Top 10″ in it’s title? You would probably open it and claim it as a trusted email, right? Not so fast! Spammers are using this title to redirect computer users to a site that may spread malicious files onto your computer.

This message comes as if it was sent from a random generated user email address, not the typical CNN.com address. We discovered that this email comes from the email address Harjinder-lkpn@321facets.com. That should raise a red flag by itself but with a catchy title like “CNN.com Daily Top 10”, many computer users may over-look the domain that it comes from. CNN would never use some unprofessional email address such as the one list above. Obviously they would use a cnn.com domain or variation of cnn.com.

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Today’s April Fool’s holiday gives spammers a chance to use the day to their advantage. Spammers have used the obvious keyword in the subject line of their spam messages to read “April Fool’s Day” drawing attention to internet users all over the world. The likelihood of a computer user opening an email titled “April Fool’s Day” on today’s date, which is April Fool’s day, is very common. The spammers know this and have jumped on the bandwagon of spamming people all over the internet.

Trend Micro, a security company, has already identified the spam messages as having an April Fool’s image which was taken from a simple Google image search using the keyword “April Fool’s Day”. The image is not original in the since that the spammer did not created it.

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Spam email messages usually mask as something newsworthy and popular to gain the attention of computer users. Recently a malicious spam alert was sent out for email messages containing the following subject lines:

• “Current Australia’s Prime Minister survived a hear attack”
• “The life of the Prime Minister is in grave danger”
• “Prime Minister survived a heard attack”

Usually Spam emails spread Trojan infections onto user’s computers. The purpose of the emails with the above phrases in the subject line is a focused attack against the Australian computer community. This is just one example of many other spam email subject lines. Other spam messages have used similar subject lines to gain the attention of computer users throughout the world.

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E-mail spammers have pulled out from their bag of viral tricks a new way to infect your machine with malicious software. In the past three months, SurfControl’s Global Threat Experts recorded a 30 percent increase in malicious e-mail threats.

According to Postini, an e-mail security company, their average 700,000 daily viral emails has increased to 35 million per day. Since July 2, Postini has seen about 275 million greeting card e-mails scam.

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