Spam Levels Augmented during April 2011

Kaspersky Lab lately released its spam report for April 2011. According to the report, the volume of spam in e-mail traffic augmented by 1.2% in comparison to the spam levels of March 2011 and averaged 80.8%.

During the second half of April, the average figure of spam levels surpassed 83.6%, indicating that the share of unwanted e-mails will continue to rise in near future.

The report further highlighted that, as anticipated at this time of year, spammers exploited the theme of Easter to circulate spam via malicious e-mails. These Easter-themed spam messages were circulated in a remarkable manner - from exclusive weight loss offers e-mails to tablets for increasing sexual potency.

Further, trendy topics, such as Mother's Day and Kate- William wedding were also exploited by the cybercrooks. For Mother's day, which is usually celebrated across several nation during early May, various advertisements related to flowers or gifts were circulated, whereas for the William-Kate wedding, fake e-mail messages with exclusive offers for souvenirs that included same imitations of Kate's engagement ring were sent.

Kaspersky's latest report further highlighted that, luckily, the rise in malware ridden spam e-mails taking advantage of the "wedding of the year" theme that was envisaged by antivirus firms didn't show up.

The report stated that, interestingly, the first incidence of spam driving somebody crazy was identified in the USA during April 2011.

Jeremy Clancy, 28, a New York citizen was so annoyed with the spam volume that he was getting regularly in his inbox and on his other social networking id's that he decided to find out the people behind it. During the time span of a week, he traced out 23 people, whom he alleged of circulating unwanted e-mails and in the evenings disconnected their Internet cables. On his 8th outing he was detained by the police. It was afterwards revealed that Clancy was a mental patient.

Besides, the report highlighted the geographical distribution pattern of spam during April 2011. India continued to be the major source of spam; responsible for around 12.76% of the entire spam amount - an augment of 1.34%. Russia continuously declined on the rankings of most popular spam sources and the spam level that originated from the USA is quite small i.e. 2.1%. Thus, it declined to 14th rank in the rating.

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» SPAMfighter News - 5/31/2011