India third most SPAM-affected country

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Ahmedabad: These are some spam mails that often flood your inboxes with the ‘you-will-soonbe-a-millionaire ’ tag. In December last year, city police got two applications of siphoning off money — Rs 17,000 in one case and Rs 34,000 in another.

In both cases, the victims were educated and had heard about such cyber frauds.But,before they could realise it they too became victims,

The Cisco annual security report suggests that India is the third most affected country in the world for spam mail attacks . Our country has seen a 130 per cent increase in spam mail attacks as compared to last year. Most of these mails originate in the US. The volume of spam mails in India between January and December 2009 has been stupendous — close to 3.6 trillion . In 2008, the country saw 1.6 trillion spam mails.

These mails originated from pharmaceutical companies, banks, educational institutions and service providers. According to the Cisco report,there has been a 30 to 40 per cent rise in spam mails in 2009 alone and these have been listed as the single most threat to business, potent enough for security concerns . I n fact, the report
states that the world’s emerging economies are responsible for output of 55 percent of the world’s total global spam.Nearly 90 per cent of the spam mails, states the report, are categorised as ‘easy spams’ — the regular promotional advertisements that flood inboxes. ‘Hard spams’ ,on the other hand, have a malware embedded in them. They force the receiver to click a link and the Trojan virus is operated.Hard spams are generally present in pharmaceutical spam mails.

Top-producing examples include ‘spamvertised’ sales of pharmaceutical products, spamvertised or ‘spamdexed’advertisements for pirated software and scareware. The year 2009 saw massive profits generated by scareware spyware and weight-loss remedy scams.However , most of the world’s developing economies, including Brazil,India,and Vietnam,show rising spam levels between January and December 2009.