Darkweb criminals are becoming increasingly intelligent in tricking people into giving them money.
Most people have dealt with email spam at some point before. It currently constitutes for a large proportion of daily global emails. Very few people however, understand where their email addresses have been picked up from and given to the hands of a spammer.
Email spam works by convincing the user that the attached files or links are genuine. The emails can be so convincing that simply by opening one, they force the user to unknowingly download malware or be subject of ransomware or banking trojan.
There was a fair share of spam campaigns targeting victims all over the world in 2016. In December, there was a spam campaign where emails would trick users into opening a Christmas themed message. By using popular keywords, the spammer attempted to integrate downloads and phishing scams into the messages.
Sending spam mail is a competitive industry which can see spammers paying money in order to target specific groups. Any spam campaign can cause a lot of damage if they are successful. The spammer hopes to take any information it can get from the victim. For businesses, it can damage infrastructure by increasing costs, damaging internet connections and putting information at risk.
How can spam be resolved?
People are finding alternative ways of retracting their names from the grasp of online criminals.
According to The Merkle, services such as The All Base on the Darkweb are playing both sides of the court. Not only do they specialise in sending out spam emails, capable of reaching and distributing more emails than any of their competitors, they also provide a secondary service which allows recipients to have their email addresses removed, avoiding receiving spam mail altogether. It costs recipients a fee which is to be paid in Bitcoin, the digital currency for Darkweb exchanges.
Considering the volume of messages that can be sent out at one time, as a victim, it’s easy to see why this fee might be worth paying in order to avoid receiving Darkweb spam mail.
However, there is a growing demand for spam email sending for criminals who may use this as a platform to leverage their success against their competitors, moreso perhaps than people would use it to pay to have their email addresses eradicated from the spam list.
The success of this model remains unseen.
With an unsurprisingly high number of email addresses on the spamming list, it’s no wonder that email spamming is not looking to slow down anytime soon. Spamming is likely to continue into the foreseeable future until there is a way to eradicate them completely.
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