Jobs and Gaddafi Remain Hot Topics for Spammers

The latest spam report by Kaspersky Labs reveals that spammers continue to use several hot news such as founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, also the company's chairman who died recently as well as Muammar Gaddafi the ousted Libyan ruler who was assassinated, for spreading unsolicited e-mails.

Reportedly according to Kaspersky, following Steve Jobs' demise, phishers and spammers largely used his name in their malicious e-mails, one being regarding certain unique iTunes add-on which Apple introduced for observing its founder's anniversary.

Thereafter, the Libyan ruler had become famous too during October 2011, as Nigerian scammers used his name in 419 e-mail scams, which centered on his former officers, wives, and children, each of them assuring huge money in exchange of just a paltry amount of cash.

The report further states that the total e-mail junk within all e-mails have increased 1.4% as opposed to that of September 2011, while accounting for a mean of 79.9%. During October this year (2011), 2.5% of all electronic mails carried malware that dropped 2% from September 2011, whereas phishing e-mails in all, declined three times to 0.01%.

Moreover, there was a greater even distribution of outgoing junk e-mails across the globe. It maybe recalled that during Q3-2011, nearly half of the entire junk e-mails originated from the five worst sources listed.

Meanwhile, on the highest ratings of spam distributors, India ranked on top, with South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia and Italy following, leaving Peru out and putting Russia on No.13 although its spam generation edged the 0.4% mark.

Furthermore, according to Kaspersky, during October 2011, malicious files sent through e-mails rated 2.5, percentage-wise, a fall of 2% in comparison with September 2011.

The countries hit with most malware were USA and Russia, with Vietnam, UK and Australia trailing on the graph, ending with South Africa accounting for 3.27% of all detections.

Additionally, phishing e-mails in the maximum number targeted PayPal accounts at 33%; eBay next at 9%; and Google, Santander and Facebook accounts too getting attacked.

More noticeable changes comprised growth in total AV detections like in Vietnam (+2.7%) and Australia (+1.65%) while a decline reported in India (-1.8%).

» SPAMfighter News - 11/30/2011