Average Spam Traffic Surged to 77.4% During October 2010

Recently, security firm Kaspersky Lab released its spam report. According to the report, the volume of spam e-mail traffic declined by around 3.7% and accounted for an average of 77.4% during October 2010.

Interestingly, according to the report, in present times, drastic alterations have been noticed amongst the leading 20 spam sources. For instance, during September 2010, India grabbed the first position from the USA. The changes further sustained during October 2010, as well, when Russia bagged the first position with 11.3% of the entire spam volume.

This was the first incidence, when the USA declined out from the list of top 10 and reached to a considerable low 18th rank. On the other hand, India acquired 8.5% share, Ukraine got 5.6% share, the UK occupied 4.7% share and Brazil grabbed 4.5% share during October 2010.

This dramatic increase in the spam traffic cropping from the USA was due to the shutdown of the Pushdo/Cutwail and Bredolab botnet command centers. Both of these centers utilized zombie computers' network that were mainly situated in the USA. Further, as per the report, the actions of an alike computer network infected by Bredolab were critically damaged following involvement by the Dutch law enforcement agencies, which led to an additional decrease in the overall spam volume.

Besides, according to the report, the first spam e-mail message that started exploiting the release of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" appeared in early October (2010), whereby spammers offered free premiere tickets to the users. To be the lucky winners of the premiere tickets, users were requested to click on the "Submit" button and furnish their personal details.

The report highlights explain that, in reality, there were no tickets to be won.

Furthermore, according to the report, the phishing e-mails occupied around 0.87% of the entire mail traffic during October 2010. Malicious files accounted for in 1.47% of all the e-mails messages, a decline of 2.86 percentage points in comparison to September 2010. Further, according to the report, during October (2010), there were several e-mails enclosing malicious attachments that abused the Halloween theme.

Related article: Africa to Face More Cyber Attacks in 2010

» SPAMfighter News - 12/13/2010