Phishing and Spam Escalating to Newer Peaks

According to the new State of Spam and phishing Report from security company Symantec issued on November 9, 2009, over 90% of the total electronic mails are either phishing or spam messages.

Symantec states in its report that increasing number of spam mails are presently emerging from Asia-Pacific and Japan, and based on the observations, these regions are likely to surpass earlier key offenders, North America and Europe.

Amanda Grady, Principal Analyst at Symantec, stated that increasing junk e-mails from Asia Pacific, Japan and South America weren't totally unexpected if one took into account the enormous rise in Internet connections there, as reported by V3 on November 9, 2009.

According to Symantec, while most of the spam continues to originate from Europe (28%), this has dropped 6% since June 2009. The security company also discovered in its report that spam attacks increasingly targeted people using social-networking websites, particularly Facebook.

During October 2009, phishing activities were found to have increased, as per earlier months' forecasts. The company saw a 17% rise in phishing attacks since September 2009, with 30% of all related fraudulent websites had been created with phishing toolkits, accounting for a 24% increase.

Symantec also found that non-English phishing websites increased 45% from September 2009. These websites used the hosting services of over 97 companies and they resulted in 8% of the total number of phishing attacks, but represented a 19% decline in the aggregate number of Web-host URLs in relation to September 2009.

Moreover, the company witnessed a significant rise in phishing websites created with phishing toolkits.

In the meantime, the most current trend of declining e-mail scams or phishing e-mails possibly has halted since toolkit attacks revived during October 2009, which suggests that the holiday period is approaching, Symantec stated.

Symantec in its October State of Spam report has stated that there is frequently a rough correlation between the total amount of spam mails and the condition prevailing over an economy. According to the company, spam represents the main portion (86%) of the total e-mail.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 11/20/2009