Popular networking sites have become one of the latest targets in recent spam attacks. Cloudmark, an anti-spam enterprise, revealed that social networking sites have seen a huge rise in spam in the 6 months to March 2008. In fact, the company claims that nearly 30% of every new account is fake and designed to spam or cause problems for legitimate users.

Cloudmark’s vice president of marketing, JF Sullivan, that these social networking sites advertise the same type of spam that users receive via the mail and attract the same type of visitors. Unfortunately, many individuals trust the popular networking sites and don’t expect to receive spam.

According to security researchers, users on the social networking sites can be conned by receiving junk messages that appear to be sent by friends or acquaintances. Many of the spammers create profiles that feature photos of attractive women to lure unsuspecting members of these social networking sites. Once individuals add these spammers to their network or profile, the con artists have an easy way to send them all spam.

Sullivan also reports the every main social networking site is experiencing spam-related problems. In fact, many of the sites receive 15 to 30% spam. Pete Simpson, manager at ThreatLab, acknowledged that spammers often target these social networking sites because they can easily gain access to a large number of different users.

A recent anti-spam judgment of $230 million awarded in favor of MySpace reinforces the popularity of social networking site members becoming easy spam targets. Two spammers were punished for creating a phishing scam which involved obtaining login details from MySpace users in order to attack them with harmful sites and fake messages. MySpace received approximately 730,000 fake messages which are all believed to have originated from the same source.

It’s important that users of social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace become more aware of the possibility of spam attacks. This may reduce the number of attacks even more than by implementing technological solutions to fix the problem.

A recent outbreak of malicious spam is reportedly responsible for 45% of the total spam online.  The Srizbi is a renowned Trojan that is advanced and effective.  This spamming malware has managed to increase the spam that contains the URLS to websites that also host more copies of the malicious program.  The program is designed in such a way that it is able to conceal its treacherous network activities and remain undetected by sniffer products.

The spam messages include a link that allegedly contains a naked movie of the recipient.  The message is made more convincing by using the recipient’s actual name and advising the read to watch the video to see that it’s true.  Unfortunately, as soon as the user clicks on the link, his or her system becomes infected and forms a growing part of the Srizbi botnet.

The spammers involved are taking advantage of naïve recipients who are quick to view the fake footage.  These unsuspecting individuals have no idea that the message actually contains malware meant to compromise their computer system. 

This tactic is certainly not a new one and has been used by many other spammers.  However, the effectiveness of the recent Srizbi botnet has propelled it to the top of list of the world’s largest, overtaking another famous botnet called Storm.

The Srizbi botnet is also known as “Cbeplay” and “Exchanger” and it contains a network of 315,000 bots that can product an astounding 60 billion email messages every day!  Ironically, the Storm botnet obtained more publicity, although it contains only 85,000 hijacked systems with only 35,000 of them designed to distribute spam.