Anti-virus provider Symantec unveiled a report indicating that at least 10,000 domain names were compromised by a redirect script that targets the New Year celebrations.
According to the company, the websites was found to have a redirect script written in PHP that has a ‘New Year’ written on its file name.
Paul Wood, senior intelligence analyst for Symantec said, “We also expect to see plenty of spam and malware taking advantage of some of the major upcoming sporting events this year. We are already seeing reference to the Summer Olympics in London as part of 419 or advance fee fraud messages.”
The report said that spammers are distributing spam emails to lure individuals to those sites that were affected. A social networking site was mentioned that was used by these unscrupulous individuals in their scheme.
Wood added that, “By relating their mails to widely-celebrated holidays and current events with global interest, spammers and malware authors can (at first glance, at least) make their messages more interesting, and increase the chance of recipients visiting spam websites or becoming infected.”
The report also stated that at least 1 in every 327 emails in Australia has been found as malicious and 1 in every 542 are phishing related.
