MyCERT 3rd Quarter 2011 Summary Report - CyberSAFE Malaysia

18Figure 4: The distribution of spam categoriesGambling/Lottery was the most commonspam category in the first quarter of 2011.Almost 90 percent of gambling/lottery emailscame from Malaysia. As shown in Figure 5,the percentage for these scams consistentlyincreased from January to March. PersonalFinance/Money recovery emails came insecond place. In February, the percentage ofemails in this category reached the highestnumber within 3 months at 40.1 percent.Spammers’ tricks and techniquesDuring the first quarter of 2011, incidentsinvolving gambling/lottery emails recordeda third of the total spam that was reportedto MyCERT. The large numbers of spamrecorded were on fake lottery winnings andcompensation claim scams. Scammers willask the victim to pay a certain amount toclaim their winnings/compensation. Oncethe victim pays the fee, they will just inventa new fee that the victim has to continuepaying. If the victim falls for that trick, theykeep inventing a new fee, until the victimgives up or runs out of money.If the victim becomes aware that the emailthat they received is a scam and stop sendingmoney, the second stage of the fraud couldoccur. Scammers will introduce themselvesas police officers or other employees whohave been arrested or who seek to arrest thecriminals in the first scam. They will promiseto return the money stolen in the first scamas shown in Figure 6.Figure 5: The Gambling/Lottery spam and Personal Finance/Money recovery scam categories in the first quarter of 2011According to Figures 3 and 4, the numbersof compromised hosts that are used to sendGambling/Lottery spam emails in Malaysiaare increasing on a daily basis. From thisdata, we can also assume that there are manyMalaysians who are still using Windows XPand the insecure Internet Explorer 6 webbrowser. This inevitably aids the distributionand infection rates for botnets that are usedto send out spam such as Waledac, Krakenor TDL-4. It also shows that the majority ofusers in Malaysia lack awareness on how tosecurely protect their computers.Figure 6: Second stage of fraud for the fake lottery scamWhy Spam is prevalentEven though spam is a nuisance, it is stillprevalent on the net with increasing statisticsevery year. One of the reasons why spam isprevalent is because many recipients of spamemails reply due to lack of awareness aboutspam emails. Many users also purchasegoods through spam emails. By respondingand purchasing goods through spam emails,it actually propagates further spam activitieson the net.e-Security | Cyber Security Malaysia | Vol: 28-(Q3/2011)© CyberSecurity Malaysia 2011 - All Rights Reserved