MXLogic - Spam Volume Rose 27% in July against June 2009

An online security company 'MX Logic' has recently released the August 2009 MX Logic Threat Forecast & Report that says spam volume rose by another 27% month over month in July 2009 against June 2009 and had surged 400% since February 2009.

Earlier, it was claimed that the percentage of spam in total mail touched its highest point ever in July, representing 94.6% of overall mail.

As per the report, health related spam continues to be the most common kind of spam. Nevertheless, health related spam represented only 69% of total spam in July 2009 as compared to 77% in June 2009 and 71% in May 2009. General offer-related spam came at a second place by having a share of 10% in total spam mails recorded in July 2009.

Besides, MX Logic said - web-borne threats seem to be crossing the verge of toleration as cyber criminals are predominantly using diverse methods to attack computer users.

Sam Masiello, Vice President of Information Security, MX Logic, stated that this shift in spam trends was worth noticing as the large volume of spam registered were getting support of usual suspects who had been developing new malware.

He also said that it seemed that emails had again fallen out of a favor as a delivery vectors for some of the important groups. However, e-mails were continued to be a major medium to deliver messages that carried links to sites that deliver malware.

Particularly, there had been a decrease in malware infected mail traffic in the month over the last couple of months.

Moreover, the reports indicated to the leading five computer worms and viruses in July 2009. These were W95/Boza.c.intd at the top place followed by W32/Boza.C, Mal/Cryptbox-A, Troj_Injector.DD and W32/Autorun-AHR. Tope five spamming countries were the United States (12.86%), Brazil (12.43%), China (5.26%), Poland (5.06%), and India (5.01%).

Commenting on the report's discoveries, security experts said - compared to July 2009, more and more infection vectors that do not depend on mail have become an ever increasing part of the spammer's armory of attacks. It appears that more attempts are being made to find out delivery methods for their spam through these latest methods.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/1/2009