Last year porn spam was, in the immortal phrasing of First Amendment attorney J.D. Obenberger, "urinating in the well we all drink from." This year, it seems porn spam isn't exactly the number one spam menace anymore, supplanted considerably by financial service, scam, and pharmaceutical spam, according to online security research and e-mail security company Clearswift.
Financial offers and pharmaceuticals together now make up almost 70 percent of spam, according to Clearswift's thirteenth spam index issued this week, compared to just shy of 40 percent 12 months ago. Porn, by contrast, accounted for 4.8 percent of all spam in the same 12-month period, Clearswift determined, down from 21.8 percent.
Clearswift product director Alyn Hockey said announcing the index that a major reason is that those marketing the financial and pharmaceutical spam campaigns trade even more heavily on people's inability to face getting the products "through proper channels" than do porn spammers. "The thing about the Internet," he said, "is that it guarantees anonymity and a lot of people would rather try to buy their Viagra [online] than go and see their family GP and discuss very personal problems."
This is quite a change from the days when Clearswift first began tracking spam content, when it found an even mix of porn, finance, health, and direct-product spam dominating the Webscape. Or, as the company itself puts it, the top trend is "the transition of spam from being annoying and indecent to illegal and malicious."
In other words, the company said, you're more likely to get your inbox flooded with offers for cheap Viagra or low-interest loans than invitations to the nearest online cathouse or replica Jennifer Lopez engagement rings.
And a major reason for the spam shift is the move by organized e-crime gangs into spam, which Clearswift said gives a "virtually invisible" channel for e-crime such as phishing scams, pump and dump stock tips, and even black-marketing illegal goods like counterfeit software. And, thanks to their reputed ability to write or tie to writers of malware and bugs, the e-crime gangs have managed to set up networks of zombie personal computers – "mainly home PCs with broadband connections," Clearswift noted – to keep a tidal wave of spam circulating.
Those zombie networks, Clearswift said, are used as platforms for e-crimes like extortion, threatened denial-of-service attacks, and fraudulent identity theft scams. “Not only does spam cause network congestion and reduce productivity, it is now being used as a channel for a plethora of malicious and illegal activity,” Hockey said.
