Spam Volume within Total E-mail Decrease in Third Quarter; Kaspersky

According to the latest report titled "Spam in Q3-2013" by Kaspersky, total spam within the entire volume of e-mail traffic declined 2.4% in Q3-2013 from Q2-2013 and settled at 68.3%, published cbronline.com dated November 8, 2013.

Nevertheless, there was an increase in spam overall that recorded 1.5 times or more, when most of it got distributed through electronic mails seeking user passwords, logins as well as secret financial data.

In the above context, Darya Gudkova Content Analysis and Research Head at Kaspersky Lab stated that in Q3-2013, there emerged quite intriguing bulk e-mails wherein online fraudsters mimicked an answering e-mail one huge anti-virus firm used on behalf of its technical support department. Cbronline.com published this.

The particular message, according to Gudkova, told the recipient in reference to a file he'd apparently dispatched for examination which revealed it was malicious software.

An engineer from the technical support department signed the message, urging the file would harm users' PCs.

Still, in case the file attachment was opened, a malicious program would get installed that Kaspersky identified as Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.q.

Meanwhile, there was a mistake in the spam mail: while the sender's e-mail id showed Symantec technical help's official id, the e-mail's automatically generated signature showed a different AV firm that was F-Secure.

Disturbingly, overall phishing e-mails rose threefold during Q3-2013 from the previous quarter, with the majority abusing websites of social media, Kaspersky disclosed.

Further, e-mail category supposedly dispatched from e-mail services occupied the second place while the same from search engines occupied the third. Indeed, it is hard to disengage these two malevolent classifications since a lot of prominent companies use a joint function of web-mail and search engines.

Overall, the above 3 classifications represented more than sixty percent of the total assaults within the top hundred companies that phishers targeted most, observed Kaspersky.

Besides, the classification, which ranked No.4 on the phisher-targeted listing, reflected financial/e-pay firms as well as banks. That doesn't mean phishers didn't prefer banks as much, but that assaults against separate institutions were hardly of such high percentages so that they could be counted among the Top Hundred.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/18/2013