Panda - Spammers Target Auto Industry More Than Any Other Industry

According to a research conducted by an online security company 'Panda Security,' cyber-miscreants are targeting the automobile sector more with malware-laden e-mails and unwanted spam compared to any other industry.

The research reveals that merely 1% of the total e-mails coming to the automobile industry are genuine or legitimate; thus, the rate of spamming to this industry is a huge 99.89%, the highest among other industries.

This spam percentage shows the striking proportion of malicious e-mails to the total e-mails received by the automobile sector, implying that merely 0.11% of the total e-mails that the motor companies receive are genuine.

Security officials also added that the study's objective was to draw a comparison in various business sectors in terms of the total malware and spam received so that the reason why spam campaigns targeted certain sectors more than others became clear.

Luis Corrons. Technical Director of PandaLabs, said that his company wanted to know whether e-mail-borne malware and spam made an equal impact on all businesses or different businesses had different factors, which determined the chances of attacks against them, as reported by Internet News on October 21, 2009.

Corrons continued that they found different rates of impact among various industries - to a maximum of 12% in terms of spam messages and the total e-mails received.

After the automobile industry, the second and third sectors receiving highest malware and spam were the electronics industry and government organizations, with all three receiving spam and malware at the rates of 99.89%, 99.78% and 99.60% respectively.

Thus, the electronics industry received just 0.22% of legitimate e-mails, and government organizations, 0.40%.

The banking sector, which many predicted as the most vulnerable, appeared far low among the rankings as its proportion of junk was 92.48%. Moreover, the education sector received 87.98% malicious e-mails followed by the tourism sector at 87.22%.

While the spam amount varied significantly for various sectors, the spammers' subject fields were largely predictable.

Finally, the research conducted during July-September 2009, assessed over 503 Million e-mails dispatched to 867 organizations in 11 sectors of 22 countries.

» SPAMfighter News - 31-10-2009

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