Cyber criminals seem to have reduced their focus on spam in emails in June.
“The proportion of spam in total mail traffic continued to fall for the second month in a row. A drop of 2-3 percentage points may not sound very much, but it could signal some major changes are taking place,” says Maria Namestnikova, Senior Spam Analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
For one, they are making use of this holiday season by mailing of fake hotel reservation notifications with a malicious attachment tagged.
“To avoid falling victim to this sort of scam, users should be particularly careful when booking trips online. Remember that no respectable tour firm will send reservation confirmations as a zipped archive," technology security solutions firm Kaspersky has said in the analysis for June.
June also saw a new version of the old trick where spammers would send photos laced with malicious code. In the new version, the recipient was threatened with 'legal action' for posting photos online without the owner’s consent.
"The photos in question were supposedly attached to the email in the form of a zipped archive," the report said.
Yet another photo-related trick this month was that of fake notifications about fines for traffic violations. The archive attached to the message is passed off as the set of incriminating photos taken by surveillance cameras, but which actually contained a malicious program.