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Email Threats: A thing of the past?

By Fred Touchette, AppRiver

There is no doubt cyber criminals continue to use personal and rented botnets to pump the
Internet full of unwanted advertisements for fake or knock-off products, but its effectiveness
as a money-making device is dwindling. Now in the cyber underbelly, email has turned from
mischievous to outright malicious with campaigns once utilizing trickery to fool recipients into
spending money to simply taking it.

Delivery Methods

Today’s cyber criminals employ many email methods to steal money. And since so many
people maintain and rely on email accounts, what better place for cyber criminals to target?

Email-borne attacks come in the form of phishing, spear-phishing, Trojans, malicious
attachments, and hidden scripts. Attack techniques are ever-evolving and adapt with
technology in an effort to stay ahead of security professionals. This constant game of “cat
and mouse” has driven malware authors to become very good at what they do, and has
resulted in some very sophisticated code.

In the beginning, cyber criminals wishing to lure victims to a malicious site would first
manually set up the site and then attract enough people to that site before it was shut down.
Later, cybercriminals sent Trojan horse viruses that pretended to be something of interest to
the receiving party. It was often the attacker’s job to write the malicious code, send out
emails, and maintain compromised sites. While the Trojan approach still lives on, the need
for one person to maintain the prerequisite skill set and personal resources is no longer
necessary thanks to underground outsourcing. Today, just about anyone with the desire and
wherewithal can assemble an entire cybercrime team and be ready to go within days.

Threat Variants

We have seen millions of variants of email-borne malware, including “Melissa” from 1999.
Melissa was dubbed after the author’s love affair with; you guessed it, a woman named
Melissa. Purporting to be a Microsoft Word document, Melissa was actually a worm that
spread so quickly it caused a massive shut down - the largest the world had ever seen up
until that point.

Fast forward a few years and a massive surge of email-delivered viruses ran rampant with
help from Blaster Worm, Sasser, Slammer, and an even more destructive and hearty strain
named Storm Worm, which had a team of people maintaining its code and its subsequent
botnet. Storm Worm’s code was so strong that it became one the most prevalent threats
from 2007 to 2010.

46 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2014 Edition
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