Spammers Remained Aggressive In April

The total spam that Irish inboxes received reached an astounding 60pc mark in April 2007. About 6pc of all e-mails carried viruses in the same month, as is evident from IE Internet figures. Siliconrepublic published the figures in news on May 3, 2007.

Web hosting and monitoring company IE Internet taps thousands of e-mails every single day. It prepares statistics on the basis of 35,000 or more Irish businesses it monitors. It said that during April, 61.94% of all e-mails contained spam. That was a drop by 2% from the previous month of March.

The firm's latest figures reveal that the United States and Korea sent out most spam to Ireland in April, according to Phelim O'Connell, managing director of IE Internet. Electricnews.net published this in its news on May 3, 2007.

Spammers have begun using free image hosting websites to penetrate through security programs. With growing number of users uploading their photos on free image-sharing sites and e-mailing its links to friends and relatives, so also spam distributors use such users' addresses. In this way spam is swelling on the Internet.

IE Internet figures also show that virus rate in April was at a low of 6%, which dropped slightly from March.

Korea sent out approximately 23% of spam to Irish inboxes in April while the United States was responsible for 24%. Although Korean population is smaller than that of U.S, the broadband penetration there is high so it draws spammers with their attacks.

China delivered slightly less than 16% of unsolicited e-mails in April, while Hong Kong was responsible for 7% and Mexico for 6% of junk e-mails.

Warezov virus was the most forceful of all types of viruses circulating on the Internet. The worm spreads through an e-mail attachment and is capable of deactivating anti-virus and firewall software and also downloads different kinds of malware. Warezov caused almost 15% of total e-mail infections.

W32/Warezov.gen was the most common virus in April accounting for 14.6 percent of infections. Next in volume was W32/Mytob.CQ@mm comprising of 14.5 percent and W32/Zafi.B@mm as the last accounted for 13 percent of virus infections.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 5/14/2007