According to the monthly reports issued by Symantec Corporation,
State of Spam and
State of Phishing, spam email has dropped 8% since last month, while phishing attacks have increased by a staggering 52% during July. The majority of spam topics continued to deal with Barack Obama’s political issues and the death of Michael Jackson.
Symantec Spam Report Summary:
After a huge spike in spam percentage that took place after Michael Jackson's death, things seemed to have calmed down to the end of July. Overall, spam went down from 90% to 82% in the total emails sent in July.
By category, product spam increased by 8%, “419” spam by 3%, image spam by 17%, while health spam decreased by 17%. In July, spam had an average size between 2 and 5 kb, spammers being most active in the Internet-related category.
The most used subject lines by spammers in July were:
“You've receive a greeting card”
“RE: UK Pharmacy Online Sale 80% OFF!”
“You have new message!”
“Delivery Status Notification (Failure)”
“You have a new message!”
As for countries of origin, the top ten ranks as follows: USA (25%), Brazil (12%), South Korea (6%), Turkey (4%), India (4%), Poland (4%), China (3%), Russia (2%), Vietnam (2%) and Argentina (2%).
Symantec Phishing Report Summary:Phishing attacks continued to target financial websites in July, with a total of 81% from all attacks. They were followed by information services websites with 17% and Government websites with only 1%.
Per category, the retail-trade sector was subject to this attacks with 62% from their total, followed in order by communications websites with 16%, and retail websites with 15%.
July started strong, with most of the attacks taking place in the first two weeks, most of them being generated by phishing toolkits (150% growth since June). These kinds of attacks have primarily targeted social networking websites, hijacking account-related information, lately used for spam reasons.
Symantec accounted for 1067 websites in 61 countries and a decrease of 29% in IP attacks. The United States and China kept the first two positions of most active sources of attack, followed by new entries in the top 5: Panama, Peru and Germany. The most active cities as source in IP attacks were Taipei (35 phishing sites), Jacksonville, Houston, Seoul and Montreal.
When using free web-hosting services, Symantec registered a decrease in attacks of 14%, with 2042 phishing websites located on 130 different free web-hosting services across the globe. The top countries in this category were USA, Germany and Romania.
As expected, the most targeted country was the US, followed by other economically developed states in the EU, like the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.
