Spammers ride high on upcoming events

After using Christmas and the year-end for spamming, cyber criminals are now busy targeting upcoming events like Valentine’s Day, UEFA Euro 2012 and Summer Olympics 2012.

By relating their mails with widely-celebrated holidays and current events of global interest, spammers and malware authors can make their messages seem interesting, thus increasing the chances of recipients falling for these, said the Symantec Intelligence Report, January 2012.

“We are already seeing references to the Summer Olympics in London as part of 419 or advance fee fraud messages,” said Abhijit Limaye, director, development, Symantec.

Here are the details of the security threats: