According to the latest State of Spam and Phishing from Symantec, a truly astonishing 92% of all adult phishing scams are being conducted across social networking sites. This coincides with a newly identified trend of adult oriented phishing whereby users are being tempted to enter personal credentials in exchange for the promise of free porn. A new trend using a very old premise, it would seem, as I recall the same 'free porn' promise being made over the years with scams ranging from Trojan Porn Diallers to drive by malware delivery. Indeed, the new trend is very similar to those attack vectors of old when you look at the payload: users are directed to a porn site which in turn leads to fake antivirus sites (most often using the pop-up alert trick) which contain malicious code. Most of the phishing sites involved have been created using free web hosting services.
Symantec warns that both scam and phishing categories have doubled as a percentage of all spam in January 2010 compared to December 2009. Even good old 419-Nigerian spam has had something of a resurrection with this particular type of scam accounting for 21% of all spam - the highest level recorded since Symantec started publishing its report.
