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The Next Evolution of Spam: Spam is Not Dead

Contrary to current opinion, spam is not dead.  This formerly popular fraud technique yielded considerable profits for fraudsters, yet has not seen significant evolution in new techniques. Spam has not seen the results once typical of this technique, however there is a new introduction in the spam fraud community that claims to make spam profitable again for cyber-criminals.
With a new fraud-as-a-service capability called PsycheR4 introduced in an online cyber crime community, it is clear that fraudsters are still heavily investing in spam. This basic fraud technique has gained new momentum with a
fraudster offering spam-sending services for rent through server-side access to a powerful botnet, the performance of which is optimized for spam. According to the forum post, this service runs $2,000 a month to rent spam-as-as-service.
Launched in an online fraud forum, PsycheR4 claims to achieve more than 8 times the market average of spam distribution per hour. According to the forum post, the market average for traditional spam email tools is around 10 million spam emails per hour, with this tool citing up to 88 million email per hour with just 1 botnet containing 7,000 bots.
This new version of spam is seen as the next evolution to grow profits for spammers. According to the translation of this offering, this spam-as-service technique offers unique capabilities in "speed and delivery."  To quote the translation, "The maximum speed of email sending reaches more than 8,000 emails per second. This is the highest speed of email sending spam solutions available in the market today.”
Companies and financial institutions face attacks across a number of areas, including spam emails directing users to fraudulent websites or phishing attacks. With this recent introduction of spam-sending services for rent, it is clear that spam remains a security concern and fraudsters are investing in methods to continue to evolve spam and profiting heavily from spam.
Trusteer delivers capabilities to detect and prevent suspected phishing sites, initiated through channels such as spam. Trusteer solutions protect hundreds of organizations and over a hundred million with a holistic, integrated fraud prevention platform that mitigates fraud risk and helps organizations protect their customers’ assets, maximize adoption of online channels, and protect their brand and the overall customer experience.

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