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Woburn, MA. 17 November, 2011 - Cyberoam, the innovator of identity-based UTM solutions, today announced a special feature of Oct 2011 Internet threats trend report, prepared in collaboration with its partner, Commtouch. In a disturbing trend, spammers have started shifting their attack tactics from botnets to compromised email accounts, wherever possible. This has particularly gathered pace after the Microsoft Consortium took down the Rustock botnet family which used to have a 30% share of global spam.

To reveal the true impact of the trend, Cyberoam conducted a survey on compromised account owners (Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook and Hotmail). Typical compromises happened due to access from public Wi-Fi networks, use of easy-to-guess passwords and clicking on a link received from a “trusted” friend in Facebook. A whopping 23% users did nothing to remediate their account, believing it to be a one-off incident.

Says Abhilash Sonwane, Sr. VP, Product Management, Cyberoam, “Trust is a major factor behind spammers switching tactics to email and social media. Most of us will click on a malware link if it comes from a close friend on Facebook. The use of these attacks for spam and scams is expected to increase in future and users must therefore, take basic precautions when they access these in public domains as well as observing sound password management.”

Cyberoam recommends account-owners to consider using a password manager that stores all passwords, generates new ones and sync them between their PCs, laptops, smartphones and tablets. It is also wise to uncheck the “remember me” box when you log into your email or Facebook and not to follow links in Facebook that accompany some hysterical or generic text such as “check this out!” or scoop such as “Osama Bin Laden death video”.