Secure Computing Releases Malware List for Q3 2008

Security company Secure Computing released its Internet Threat Report for Q3 2008 which reveals that the malware targeting social networking Websites have become the main source from where spam generate.

The report also disclosed the increase in panic creating bank failure e-mail spam, which appears to exploit the latest financial downturn. Scareware software circulation on the net increased tremendously and the election based spam surged, featuring Barack Obama in almost 80% of the total election based spam mails.

Further, TrustedSource Labs of Secure Computing estimated that the amount of US election based spam mails worldwide to be around 100 Million mails every day.

Moreover, the rise in 'Breaking News' e-mail spam as the latest method to attract users to click on the attached link for interesting headlines was also used. These spam were misleading Delivery Status Notifications that mark a strong entry on the Most Frequent Spam list.

Secure Computing also claimed that the amount of spam touched very high figures in Q3 2008, with steady monthly increase during the whole summer. The invasion of innocent systems through mail and Web related infections were also noticed in third quarter with almost 5,000 latest zombies made per hour.

Also, during Q3 2008, the TrustedSource reputation system were able to recognize around 600 sites that were hosted and classified as harmful before serving any harmful content.

The researchers also recognized that hackers make use of zero day or zero hour malware code not found by the conventional signature based anti malware program.

The report also claims that the US and China topped the globe in terms of amount of hosted sites which circulate malware. Nearly 60% of malicious sites are hosted in these two countries. As far as phishing attacks are concerned, the US and Netherlands host almost 60% of total URLs accessed.

Further, the company reports that in the 2006 holiday session, mail volumes had touched almost 100 Billion mails every day. The amount of spam mails were around 200 Billion in the beginning of 2008. Also, Secure Computing professes a 25% expansion in Q4 and new figures for mail and spam used.

Related article: Secure Computing Released Internet Threats for Q2 of 2008

» SPAMfighter News - 11/12/2008