Spam Increases to 70.7% of Total E-mail Traffic

Kaspersky Lab the security company has just published its Q2-2013 spam report that gives thorough information on spam trends during the three months April-June 2013. It was discovered that there was a 4.2% increase in junk e-mails within the entire e-mail traffic to 70.7% from Q1 to Q2.

The second quarter spam demonstrated one unusual characteristic i.e. the trend with electronic card dispatches that used the name of Hallmark a well-known greeting card business in the US. These carried malevolent files attached and distributed to Internauts on prominent holidays.

A tactic that spammers employed during Q2-2013 was random text included in their messages, at the lower end, so the e-mail looked like a newsletter. This text is called "white text."

Special attention was given to news features regarding the Korean discord, the Boston Marathon and Hugo Chavez.

Spam mailers further utilized celebrity names for potentially duping recipients.

Moreover, regarding the geographic regions that most profusely distributed spam, Russia experienced a spam volume decline to 2.6% during Q2-2013 from 3.2% during Q1-2013 in global spam contribution. Consequently, the country slid from 7th to 9th position on the Top Ten List of global spammers. Notably, spam to Russia comes chiefly from Taiwan at 12.2%, Vietnam at 9.4% and Ukraine at 9%, the report stated.

Further as per Kaspersky's report, China continues to be the biggest spam generator in the world, contributing 23.1%, as USA and South Korea follow at 16.8% and 12.6% respectively.

A fascinating aspect of Kaspersky's statistics is that they don't match with The Spamhaus Project's latest findings. Spamhaus is a worldwide non-profit organization, which monitors global spam-operations as well as promotes to governments the need to legislate efficacious anti-spam laws.

Spamhaus stated that on 6th August, 2013, among the nations spewing spam, Russia was on No.3 following China and USA, with Ukraine following Russia.

The report also mentioned that phishing e-mail volume within worldwide e-mail traffic declined 0.0016% reaching 0.0024%. Not very different from Q1-2013 trend, total phishing scams targeting social networks dropped 3.3%, while those on financial organizations rose 1.2%, thereby shoving the category onto No.2 within the rankings, Kaspersky stated.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/15/2013