Spam Evolving to Ever-Greater Risk, Finds Study

According to AV-Test an independent security company, which has just published one study titled "Spam-More Dangerous that Ever Before," while we now have the most advanced anti-spam software, the danger that such bulk e-mails pose, despite so, supersedes any that were seen before.

Incidentally, the basis of the study is an 18-month long research spanning from August 2011 to February 2013 wherein the security company harvested as well as examined about 550,000 junk electronic mails.

Similar as previously, most of those spam mails made fake offers of bogus items such as false pharmaceuticals in addition to phishing recipients off their credentials and money.

However, there's a different, gloomier objective of spam getting dispatched nowadays since about 2.5% of the messages understandably aim at disseminating malware.

Some specific kinds of junk electronic mails pose particular kind of threat because from among the 30,000 bulk e-mails, which contained attachments and which AV-Test examined, it became apparent that 10,000-or-more of those e-mails had malware infection of some sort.

Most of the contaminated electronic mails carrying attachments happened to be typical instances of spam assaults such as those having HTML documents, ZIP files or EXE, SCR, COM, BAT executables, alternatively PIF files.

The spam mails almost in complete number had zipped attachments consisting of malicious programs. Approximately 400,000 junk e-mails carried URLs. Web-links counting almost 1% of the total within the URL-embedded messages actually took end-users onto sites contaminated with malware.

Intriguingly, the study indicates that an enormous quantity of spam was sourced to enterprise outlets. For, spam volumes dispatched during Monday-Friday remained extremely steady prior to declining to 25% during Saturday-Sunday. It thus becomes clear that twenty five percent of the total spam-spewing botnets are inside work-places where they're turned off on Friday evenings. Consequently, the spam volumes dispatched on Mondays subsequently rises, says AV-Test.

Further, 50% of the junk messages from the total 30K having attached files, documented within the research, were sourced to China, Germany, India and USA. Nonetheless, the Germany-sourced spam mails with file attachments were less risky as merely ten percent of the messages carried malicious programs inside them.

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» SPAMfighter News - 4/17/2013