Network Box – Spam, Malware and Virus Attacks Rising

According to a recent analysis of Internet threats by Network Box, malware and spam continued to rise in May 2009, with malware items rising 28.7% and spam levels rising 27.7%.

The company discovered that viruses emanating from the UK had also increased in number during the preceding month of April 2009. The country now accounts for 3% of all malicious software generated across the world from around 2% in April 2009.

Further, Korea and the US are the countries generating the maximum number of the global online threats. Accordingly, Korea generates 6% of the total viruses and the US 17.2% of the same. The two nations are also among the three sources that produce the maximum amount of spam, with the US generating 11.4% of all spam, Brazil (8%) and Korea (4.2%).

India was placed eighth among the top countries for both spam and viruses, with 3.63% and 2.77% separately.

However, the percentage of phishing attempts slightly came down to around 20% of the total number of viruses in May 2009 from 24.6% during April 2009.

Simon Heron, Internet Security Analyst, Network Box, says that there is a slight decline in the growth of online threats from the huge 63% observed during April 2009, but with respect to amounts, malware and spam are continuing to grow at significant rates, as reported by ITBackbones on May 28, 2009. Heron adds that the same countries namely Korea and the US continue to be responsible for the rising number of malware and spam attacks.

The security company also released its list of ten most prevalent viruses. Accordingly, 'nbh-bscript' ranks No.1 with 22.5% of the total number of threats. 'Spam.phish.url' and 'nbh-bbahdr' rank No. 2 and No.3 with 20.4% and 12.5% of all detection separately, while the notorious 'virus.win32.virus' ranks No. 8 with 0.90% of the entire detection.

Symantec has recently published a report, based on which, approximately 90.4% of the entire e-mail traffic represents malicious spam; up 5% from April 2009 i.e. one in every 1.1 electronic messages represents a spam mail. Moreover, cyber criminals are employing bogus antivirus software as a way to exploit Captcha.

Related article: Notorious Russian ISP RBN Hacked Bank of India Website

» SPAMfighter News - 6/2/2009