Online shopping is predicted to increase in the lead up to Christmas, with spammers looking to cash in on the action. Security software company Symantec has published the top 12 products spammers are likely to push this month, and tips to avoid getting viruses or other nasties from the emails.
Spammers are most likely looking to cash in on Xmas shopping with the following products:
Laptops
Replica watches
Business cards
High Definition TVs
Male enhancement drugs
MP3 Players
Discount software
Free mobile phones
Handheld video games
Cameras
Weight loss solutions
Gift vouchers
Currently, Symantec is tracking spam levels at nearly 71 percent of all email traffic – last Christmas spam accounted for 59 percent. While monitoring more than 450 million inboxes worldwide for spam, Symantec Corp says it observes an increase in spam volume coming into the year-end holidays, and 2007 is no exception.
Symantec’s Recommended Best Practices to Prevent Holiday Spam:
1) Protect your desktop with an up-to-date antivirus, firewall, and spam filter.
2) Do not click on, or reply to, any email that appears to be spam. Doing so could alert the spammer(s) that the user is replying from a legitimate email address (therefore, the spammer would find it worth the time to send more spam in the direction of that Inbox).
3) Never click on any link in a suspicious email. If it is felt that the sender is legitimate, contact the sender directly (not by email) to ensure the email message is also legitimate.
