Spam Originating in Russia on the Rise

Antivirus vendor Trend Micro warns that Russia is quickly climbing up the list of top spammiest countries and is playing a major role on the spam landscape.

Russia's month-to-month growth in spam output was impressive. In August it was in seventh place on the list of top 10 spam-sending countries.

It then jumped to sixth place in September and fourth in October. Overall, for the third quarter of 2003 it occupied the third position, after United States and India.

For the same three-month period of time, Russian antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab positions the country in fifth place, after US, India, Vietnam and Great Britain.

"Russian spam played a key role in many of the spam runs seen this month. From pharmaceutical to replica, casino, dating, malware-related, and salad spam, Russian IPs were found to be consistent contributors," writes Florabel Baetiong, an anti-spam research engineer at Trend.

According to Trend Micro's October 2010 Threat Roundup report [pdf], Europe was the spammiest continent last month, accounting for 38% of the total junk mail traffic.

The top five was led by US (23.70%), India (12.78%) and Brazil (11.33%) and was completed by Russia (10.45%) and Vietnam (9.86%).

As much as 45% of spam was formatted as HTML, while 22% used plain text. The most common type of attachments were PDF and DOC, encountered in 6% of spam emails respectively.

Furthermore, 23% of emails were scams and 21% fell into the commercial/advertising category. Other prominent spam categories were employment (11%), health/medical (9%), financial (7%), education (5%) and adult/dating (5%).

As far as email phishing is concerned, the top target was PayPal, which was followed by Alliance & Leicester, CartaSi, ANZ Bank, HSBC, Bank of America, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, eBay, First National Bank of South Africa and HMRC.

"October proved to be a very busy month for cybercriminals, as they paved the way for several zero-day vulnerability exploits, new emerging threats, and increasingly powerful old malware families," the Trend report concludes.