AppRiver Spots 13bn Spam Mails, 171m Virus-Laced Junk E-mails during H1-2013

AppRiver the provider of web security and e-mail messaging solutions, of late, published its 2013 first half or H1-2013 Global Threatscape Report that states that when the company screened a total of fifteen billion e-mails, it found 13bn as spam mails, while 171m contained PC-viruses.

In 2012, spam mails were observed as declining, but this year (2013) they are rising again. AppRiver points out that when June 2013 came, spam messages became almost twofold that of the January 2013 volume as well as reached the peak rate ever-since November 2011.

Reportedly, USA has been responsible for maximum spam, however, the erstwhile Belarus of the Republic of Soviet Union too was responsible for significant spam and it ranked No.2 among the top ten spam-originating countries, according to AppRiver some weeks back.

The company outlined one more discovery it made during January 2013. This was distributed denial-of-service spam distraction. The threat was a DDoS sample employed for distracting banks as fake monetary transactions were being carried out. Within the current case, though, the threat was aimed at the individual user accessing his A/C. The security company explained how unexpectedly an end-user found his inbox getting series of uncountable spam mails with irrelevant content.

The process would go on from 12-24 hours when as many as 60,000 nonsensical spam mails got delivered from botnets. Then suddenly the incoming of the messages would stop. The idea being -blocking one's reach to personal lawful e-mails. Before that, however, the cyber crooks had already acquired banking details from the victim, so immediately prior to carrying out any fake transaction, the crooks would inundate the victim's mailbox. This was done for concealing any e-mail from the bank confirming account transaction.

In the meantime, the majority of assaults, according to AppRiver in its new report, unleashed attack toolkits such as RedKit, Fiesta or BlackHole.

Describing RedKit, AppRiver states that it uses exploits of Adobe Reader or Java for entering vulnerable websites where it installs its crime-ware that is usually one banker Trojan, which seizes passwords, A/C logging in details, cookies, browser histories and more belonging to the victims.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/9/2013