E-mail Borne Cyber Crime Drops in June 2010

As per the Symantec's June 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, the total number of viruses, phishing and e-mail-based spam seems to have fallen although the Football World Cup is the subject of cyber criminals' malicious attacks.

Paul Wood, a senior analyst at Symantec Hosted Services, said that although the statistics showed downturn in different forms of cyber crime, it was not clear whether the malicious activities came down in June 2010, as reported by ITPRO on June 22, 2010.

As per the MessageLabs' figures, the proportion of e-mail embedded viruses in the total e-mail traffic from previously known and new bad origins stood at 1 out of 276.4 e-mail (0.362%) in June 2010 - a drop of 0.11 percentage points. E-mails containing malware links to corrupt websites represented a decline of 5.9 percentage points from May 2010.

Once again, Sality.AE virus became the most frequently blocked malware in the month of June 2010. The main goal of Sality.AE virus is to install and download additional malicious software on the victim's machine. The virus also blocks access to different security related domains, deletes security-related files and stops security-related services.

In June 2010, the security firm has discovered an average of 1,598 websites everyday that host malware and other malicious programs such as adware, spyware. However, there was a decline of 9.7% in malicious website when compared with figures in May 2010.

The analysis reveals that 30.3% of the total new malicious domains blocked during June 2010, down 1.5% compared to May 2010. Nevertheless, 12.4% of all the new web-based malware were blocked in June 2010, up 0.15% since May 2010.

Besides, cyber criminals targeted most Public Sector with their malware. One out of 124.0 e-mail blocked is malicious in nature. Public Sector is followed by Chemical & Pharmaceutical, IT Services, Retail, Education and Finance.

The report also states that the virus activities in Taiwan stood at one out of 55.1 emails, making it one of the most targeted country in terms of e-mail borne malware during June 2010. The UK witnesses the highest number of phishing attacks at one out of 261.0 emails in June 2010.

Related article: E-Crime Reporting Format To Be Launched in July

» SPAMfighter News - 7/1/2010