Spam Volume Continues to Decrease: Symantec

Recently, security firm Symantec released its report entitled "December 2010 State of Spam & phishing Report". According to the report, spam volume continued to decline consecutively for the fourth month in November 2010, thus reaching its lowest level since January 2009.

As per the company's report, decline in the spam amount also reduced the overall spam percentage. Spam constituted 84.31% of all the messages during November 2010 in comparison to the 86.61% during October 2010, as reported by Softpedia on December 17, 2010.

This decline in spam volume is quite a surprise because it comes during a time when spam volume is generally at its peak as cybercriminals try to take advantage of the festive season.

Although the overall spam volumes have reduced, the output of junk e-mails that comes under the category of "products" has augmented by 30%.

Besides, according to the report, RU remains the only nation code TLD (top-level domain) in the top of five most exploited domain extensions, where it presently ranks second after COM with 23.3% share.

Disturbingly, according to the security firm's report, the United States stands No.1 in terms of producing spam. Around 27% of spam e-mails are originated from the country. The Netherlands is No.2 with 5% rate. The Netherlands was followed by India (5%), Brazil (4%) and Russia (4%), at positions three, four and five respectively.

On the contrary, the report highlighted that while spam volume decreased, overall phishing attacks augmented by 37% during November 2010. This dramatic change was mainly due to an augmentation in both automated toolkit attacks and unique phishing websites.

The security firm highlighted that, phishing websites developed by automated toolkits considerably increased by around 90%. Increased in toolkit phishing was mainly due to a phishing attack that imitated a famous American bank. Additionally, unique URLs augmented by around 18%, whereas phishing websites with IP domains (domains such as http://255.255.255.255) augmented by nearly 41%.

Furthermore, as per the report, the United States topped the list in terms of phishing attacks and accounted for 51% of the total phishing attacks. The US was followed by Canada with 11%. Russia, Germany, and South Korea grabbed the second, third, and fourth respectively with 9%, 8%, 3% shares respectively.

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» SPAMfighter News - 12/30/2010