Spam Crossed Ninety Percent Mark in July 2010

Spam output reached ninety percent in July 2010 with junk mails or spam mails accounting for 91.98% of the total traffic as compared to 88.32% in June 2010.

Another interesting change was noticed in the size of spam mails, particularly in the over 10 KB range, where the score fell from 21.78% to 12.32%. Symantec Researchers stated in the company's recent State of Spam and phishing Report that this was partly because of a reduction in spam carrying malware attachments, as per the reports by Softpedia on August 12, 2010.

Internet services remained the undisputed leader of spam category, with 33% of junk mails or spam mails, whereas pharmacy spam increased in July 2010, pushing the heath category to the second position with 21%. Financial and product spam followed at third place with 13%.

Regarding the origination of spam, 22% of total spam traffic originated from the USA, putting the country ahead of its competitors, India and Netherlands both with 6%.

Moreover, the recent report contains information about the leading subject lines in July 2010, which included- Blank subject line, Delivery Status Notification, You an received a Greeting Card, Amazon.com, Returned mail: see transcript for details, Unreturned mail returned to sender, Nikki sent you a message, My Pics, failure notice, and Give your partner a one-way ticket to ecstasy-land.

As per the latest report, phishing numbers fell by 5% in July 2010.

The reduction could be attributed to two sectors of phishing - automated toolkit attacks and Internet Protocol (IP) domains. phishing sites created by automated toolkits slumped by 60% unique URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) rose by 10% from June 2010.

Further, phishing websites with IP domains (for e.g. - http://255.255.255.255) reduced by nearly 48% and webhosting services consisted of 15% of all phishing, a rise of 25% from June 2010. The number of non-English phishing websites increased by 15%. Among the non-English phishing sites, Italian and French remained high in July 2010.

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» SPAMfighter News - 8/20/2010