Looking back at spam in 2009

At the end of last year, it was predicted spam volumes would rise slightly higher than 95 percent in 2009 because of a growing use of botnets. Let's see if the prediction came true.

In January, France was the most spammed country in the world (83.3 percent of all emails), and virus activity was most pronounced in the UK (1 of every 165.6 emails).

Spam rates continued to increase this period and fully regained levels consistent to spam rates before the McColo take-down; driven by the financial crisis, the most popular spam campaigns included positive salary structure, diploma and education schemes and added scam tactics seeding a new botnet that centered on President Barack Obama's inauguration.

The exploitation of Valentine’s Day by spammers has become an annual event as advertisers attempt to pawn everything. However, Valentine’s Day also gives spammers the perfect opportunity to spread malware and grow their botnets as optimistic Valentine recipients actually look forward to opening messages from perfect strangers.

This year the Waledec botnet was distributing Valentine’s specific spam with subject lines such as “a Valentine card from a friend” and “you have received a Valentine E-card”. Two other rival spam botnets Donbot and Pushdo have also adopted similar tactics. The Waledec botnet is widely considered by security researchers to be the latest incarnation from the same spam gang that brought us the notorious Storm botnet.


March saw the advent of large scale malicious spam campaigns posing as an email from courier firm DHL, and also of a widespread, malicious spam campaign that use social engineering to customize messages to potential victims' location.

The first quarter of 2009 statistics: 91 percent of messages were spam, while 1.6 percent, or more than 1.1 million messages, were infected with some type of malware. The U.S. was the leading source of spam, accounting for 11.6 percent of the total, followed by Brazil (11.5 percent) and Romania (5.8 percent), and Twitter has been heavily targeted by cyber-crooks as a platform for launching phishing attacks.

Research findings that reveal spam e-mail is not only a nuisance, but is damaging to the environment and substantially contributes to green house gas emissions, were released in April.

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