Softpedia >News >Security >Spam Reports
Softpedia Homepage   

One in Ten Spam Messages Contains Malware

Europe responsible for almost half of spam traffic in 2010

Jul 2, 2010 12:04 GMT  ·  By
11.2% of spam emails in the last six months contained malware
   11.2% of spam emails in the last six months contained malware

According to a report from AppRiver, over ten percent of spam messages intercepted in the past six months distributed some form of malware. During the same time, almost 45% of junk email traffic originated in Europe.

The latest statistics compiled AppRiver, an email and Web security vendor based out of Gulf Breeze, Florida, confirm that email-borne malware is making a comeback compared to recent years. "During the past 30 days alone, AppRiver has quarantined more than 45 million virus messages," the company's spam researchers write in their 6-month "Threat & Spamscape" report (PDF).

In total, since the beginning of the year, 11.2% of spam emails contained malware; trojans, for the most part. AppRiver's list of top 20 threats detected in infected messages contains several versions of computer trojans like Kryptik or Bredolab. The malicious PDF files that have become so popular with attackers lately are also listed.

As far as spam traffic origin is concerned, Europe was responsible for 44.7% of the 26 billion messages quarantined by AppRiver during the past six months. This is not surprising since, according to the company's statistics, half of the top ten most spamming countries are European states. Europe is followed by Asia with 26.3%, South America with 12.4%, North America with 13.9% and Australia & Oceania with 2.3%.

Breaking the numbers down by country, the United States takes the first spot by far with over 2.5 billion spam messages generated. Brazil and India fill in the top three, each sending out around 1.8 billion spams this year. The rest AppRiver's list is completed in order by Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Rep. of Korea, Romania and France.

The security researchers also note that Facebook is one of the top ploys for luring victims into opening infected files. "Over the past six months, we have seen several peaks and valleys in the amount of attacks using Facebook as a cover, and sometimes it even becomes difficult to report on every one considering there can be so many and the similarities difficult to discern at times," they write.

You can follow the editor on Twitter @lconstantin