MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Old-fashioned spam continues to be a very effective way of spreading malware, including one of the most dangerous banking Trojans, according to a new report from security firm Symantec.
According to Symantec, the Trojan Dridex is infecting thousands of computers each month purely through spam. Symantec called Dridex one of the “most dangerous” Trojans being spread now.
"We think Dridex is the most dangerous, mainly because of its prevalence," says Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response, where he oversees security content gathered from Symantec's Global Intelligence Network.
In its report, Symantec noted that while overall spam rates have declined globally, Dridex attacks continue to be waged exclusively through spam, and they're primarily targeting victims in English-speaking countries.
"This group, clearly is very successful at spam, and we think a lot of that has to do with the effectiveness of their social engineering," said a Symantec spokesperson. "They continue to tinker and tinker and tinker to find out what works. And they've come up with a formula, and they're really being successful with it."
Symantec said it is seeing one-to-three different campaigns being run every day, with each campaign sending between 200,000 and 300,000 e-mails.
Symantec said it has seen 300 different financial organizations being targeted. The company added the e-mails do not include the typos and grammatical errors common in many spam campaigns, and that the sources of the spam have become very good at identifying effective subject lines, especially around invoices.