Cloudmark’s 3Q13 Global Messaging Threat Report

With the third quarter comes autumn and, for the UK, the beginning of its English Premier League. Quick not to miss a step, online betting sites have taken immediate advantage of the start of football season with targeted SMS advertising campaigns. Each Saturday and Sunday, clubs from around the UK go head-to-head while viewers’ phones are simultaneously slammed with enticing introductory offers to various sports betting websites and services. Below in Figure 1, we can see that the volume of this type of SMS spam spikes each Saturday and soon subsides, only to spike again the following week.

Between weekly surges of SMS spam promoting offers such as "Play football?s biggest bet," it's obvious that spammers are targeting the viewership of the world's most popular sport. Even though sports betting spam has spiked to more than 50% of all UK SMS spam on a single Saturday, it is still no match for payday lending SMS spam. This behemoth of a category continues to dominate the region's list of top SMS spam types. This is despite a continued effort by Britain's Office of Fair Trade to audit the payday lending market's shady habits. The 7-day moving average of UK payday loan SMS spam is shown below in Figure 2 along with key dates related to the OFT's actions. Details regarding this on-going struggle to reign in the market can be found in Cloudmark's 3Q13 Global Messaging Threat Report.

Moving eastward, Iran has shown an interesting change in its email traffic this quarter. Since the beginning of July, the volume of Iranian IP addresses blocked by Cloudmark due to spam has nearly doubled. The bulk of their email spam originates from compromised Iranian computers and is aimed primarily at English speaking countries. Other popular destinations include Spain, Japan, Italy, and Uruguay. Interestingly, Iran lifted sanctions on the sale of laptops and routers within its borders on July 1st. Coincidence? Maybe. For more on this, as well as a dive into Japan's spam email trends and other research findings, visit our 3Q13 Global Messaging Threat Report.