14 DAY TRIAL // According to Kaspersky Lab's spam report for August, Hong Kong was the second most spammmiest region after the United States last month and was responsible for 7.7 percent of the world's junk emails.
The overall spam output has decreased by 2.4% in August compared to July and averaged at 82.6% of the total email traffic.
Except for Hong Kong's significant jump of fifteen places, another notable change on the list of top 20 spam sources is the return of Canada and Netherlands.
The United States continues to lead as usual, with a score of 15.5%, while India come in third after Hong Kong, with 7.2%.
As far as the phishing landscape is concerned, PayPal remained the most phished brand and is followed by eBay and HSBC Bank.
World of Warcraft jumped from 8th to 4th position compared to July, pointing to a more active market for online gaming credentials during this period.
The biggest change was recorded for phishing attacks targeting Facebook credentials, which decreased by over 10 percent. This caused the site to drop significantly in the top, from 2nd to 9th place.
"It’s difficult to say what caused the cybercriminals’ huge loss of interest in this social network. Perhaps it might be the calm before the storm," the Kaspersky researchers said.
The practice of distributing malware via email is on an increasing trend, suggesting that it works. Over 6% of emails carried a malicious attachment last month, representing a 3% increase over July.
The Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Agent was the dominant family of email-borne malware, with two of its variants coming in 1st and 8th positions.
Meanwhile, a scareware installer detected by Kaspersky as Trojan-Downloader.Win32.FraudLoad.xexa came in second with a score of over 10%.
Zbot, Bredolab and malicious HTML redirectors, which have all been distributed in aggresive campaigns recently, are also present on the list of top ten threats.