No let up in phishing and spam attacks

Symantec reported a rise in spam and phishing in its June data, released this week.

Michael Jackson's death and 4th of July holiday in the US were used in campaigns to dupe users to click on malicious links.

Symantec said image spam, where spammers attach images purporting to be popular news items, re-emerged as a top spam threat.

Symantec also observed a wave of fake Twitter invitations carrying a mass-mailing worm.

Meanwhile, the vendor's phishing report found that the Australian Tax Office was a popular subject for scams in June. 

Symantec said the scam targeted victims, by requesting users to supply personal financial details and print a form.

A closer observation of phishing tactics in Asia Pacific revealed an overall increase of 21 percent in phishing attacks in comparison to May.

The report also showed a number of phishing URLs generating using automated phishing toolkits increased by nine percent.

Furthermore, there was a sudden increase in toolkit attacks during the last week of June, largely due to phishers targeting popular social networking sites - a trend that continues to re-emerge, stated Symantec.

There was a significant increase in the number of free web hosting services used for developing phishing sites, which accounted for 10 percent of all phishing attacks, which translated to a 96 percent increase when compared to May.

Phishing attacks in Italian, French and Chinese languages were found to be higher in June with Symantec observing a 21 percent increase.