Kaspersky – Spam Volume Remained High in H1 2009 Despite Economic Crisis

Kaspersky Lab, a vendor of secure content management solutions, has released its new report on the growth of spam in Russia in the first of 2009. Security analysts have studied the trends exhibited by spam messages amidst the danger of global financial crisis.

According to the security experts, the volume of spam messages advertising the services of spammers reached a high level in the first half of 2009. But the share of spam touting legal goods and services supplied by the real economy significantly slumped.

Kaspersky Lab analysts further said that the staggering growth in such types of spam substantiated the poor state of small and medium sized businesses at the time of crisis, as reported by Kaspersky on August 25, 2009.

The report also highlighted an interesting fact about the growth of spam volume by referring to resistive nature of the spam industry against the economic crisis or financial meltdown. Despite the gloomy market conditions, spam volume averaged 85.5% of the overall e-mail traffic in the first half of 2009. The lowest spam volume at 72.8% of overall traffic was recorded on April 26, 2009 while the highest percentage was registered on February 22, 2009 at 93%.

The security company said that 0.3% of spam message were laced with malicious attachments.

Another interesting trend to be noted in the first half of 2009 was slump in the share of phishing e-mails as they accounted for mere 0.6% of total mail traffic. The number of phishing e-mails had been falling on monthly basis except May 2009 when their number significantly scaled up. In the first quarter of 2009, phishing e-mails had a share of 0.78% in total traffic which dropped to 0.49% in the second quarter.

In their earlier prediction, Kaspersky experts said that the number of fraudulent e-mails would rise despite of vastness of the ongoing economic crisis. They discussed the ways generally used by phishers to make their victims. For instance - phishers use negative situation to scare users and encourage them to reveal their personal information, leading to big phishing scams.

As the number of phishing e-mails have declined, it gives an impression that anti-phishing measures taken by different organizations, including banks, financial service providers and payment system, have spread awareness of cyber threats. This has resulted in loss to scammers, phishers, spammers and other criminals who were earlier making huge profits.

Related article: Kaspersky Released malware Statistics for September 2008

» SPAMfighter News - 9/11/2009