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A new security report from Cisco found there was a 90 percent growth in threats coming from legitimate domains in 2008; nearly double what visible 2007. Continually making their emails more personalized in attempts to steal users information, spammers are once again on the rise.

Messages are looking more credible, and spammer are learning to hide their tracks more efficiently as time goes by. More online criminals are using real email accounts with large legitimate Web mail providers to send spam. “reputation hijacking”, as it is becoming known, is when spammers send an email appearing to be from a legitimate source; even the ISP may seem to match up. This makes the emails harder for filters to catch. Hijacked reputation Spam accounted for less than 1 percent of all spam globally in 2008, but made up 7.6 percent of the provider’s mail traffic. 

Spam accounts for about 90 percent of worldwide email, topping out at close to 200 billion messages each day. The United States is the biggest source at 17.2 percent – big surprise there. Other countries who contribute spam include Turkey (9.2%), Russia (8%), Canada (4.7%), Brazil (4.1%), India (3.5%), Poland (3.4%), South Korea (3.3%), Germany and the United Kingdom (2.9% each).

“Every year we see threats evolve as criminals discover new ways to exploit people, networks and the Internet. This year’s trends underscore how important it is to look at all basic elements of security policies and technologies,” said Patrick Peterson, Cisco chief security researcher.

“Organizations can lower their risk of data loss by fine-tuning access controls and patching known vulnerabilities to eliminate the ability for criminals to exploit holes in infrastructures. It is important to upgrade applications, endpoint systems and networking equipment to help ensure that corporate systems run smoothly and minimize risk.”

In addition to this report, Cisco’s report on internet vulnerability as a whole was also made public. Matters in that venue are as bad or worse, as in the case of plug ins that actually create a hole in consumer’s computer defenses.

“Add-on patching and updates don’t seem to have the same kind of rigor or delivery vehicle as more standard apps,” Peterson said. “I just installed Windows Update, but when it comes to something like Flash, the way it gets updated, it doesn’t seem to have the same kind of rigor. It leads people to have an OS {operating system} that is patched but some kind of browser plugin that is not patched and they don’t even know how to get the patch.”

Hopefully matters will start to improve, but the outlook is bleak, Petersen added that there are constant setbacks in the battle against spam, which continues to double yearly.