Germany gets the most malicious spam
Contributed by: Email on 10/26/2012 11:31 AM
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German email users have unseated users from the US as the recipients of most malicious email messages. According to a report on September's spam by Kaspersky, Germany hit the top of the chart with 13.87% of malicious mail being directed at its users, followed by Spain (7.43%), Russia (6.85%), India (6.39%), Vietnam (5.95%), Australia (5.94%), China (5.80%) and the US (5.62%). The US had led the chart for the previous eight months.
Overall, Kaspersky says that 3.4% of all emails contained malicious files, a drop of 0.5 percentage points compared to the previous month. Germany saw a six percentage point rise in its detections and Spain saw a four percentage point rise, while United Kingdom's share dropped two percentage points to 4.67%.
It was also a month for drastic changes in the top ten malware detected by Kaspersky. Long-term leader "Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen" fell out of the top ten completely, giving its top spot to "Backdoor.Win32.Androm.kv" (aka Backdoor.Trojan and PWS-Zbot.gen.ana), a backdoor trojan which enables remote access, being found in 6.32% of the malicious emails. It was followed by "Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.gt", an email address harvester and malicious program downloader, and then the "Email-Worm.Mydoom.m" and "Mydoom.l" email address harvesters. Also in the top ten were four ransomware trojans.
Of the spam that didn't have malicious programs attached, Kaspersky noted a rise in mails with an oil and gas theme, such as bogus lottery mails apparently from Russian energy companies Gazprom and Lukoil. They also noted an increase in spam pointing users at infected coupon sites with good imitations of legitimate Groupon mailings, the appearance of Michelle Obama's name in lottery email which claims to come from the "World Wide Web Owner" and mass English-language mailings of the controversial film "The Innocence of Muslims" which lacked the expected malicious attachments or dangerous links. Overall, spam levels grew by 2.3 percentage points from August to reach 72.5% of all email traffic, and phishing mails tripled, to reach 0.03%.
Overall, Kaspersky says that 3.4% of all emails contained malicious files, a drop of 0.5 percentage points compared to the previous month. Germany saw a six percentage point rise in its detections and Spain saw a four percentage point rise, while United Kingdom's share dropped two percentage points to 4.67%.
It was also a month for drastic changes in the top ten malware detected by Kaspersky. Long-term leader "Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen" fell out of the top ten completely, giving its top spot to "Backdoor.Win32.Androm.kv" (aka Backdoor.Trojan and PWS-Zbot.gen.ana), a backdoor trojan which enables remote access, being found in 6.32% of the malicious emails. It was followed by "Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.gt", an email address harvester and malicious program downloader, and then the "Email-Worm.Mydoom.m" and "Mydoom.l" email address harvesters. Also in the top ten were four ransomware trojans.
Of the spam that didn't have malicious programs attached, Kaspersky noted a rise in mails with an oil and gas theme, such as bogus lottery mails apparently from Russian energy companies Gazprom and Lukoil. They also noted an increase in spam pointing users at infected coupon sites with good imitations of legitimate Groupon mailings, the appearance of Michelle Obama's name in lottery email which claims to come from the "World Wide Web Owner" and mass English-language mailings of the controversial film "The Innocence of Muslims" which lacked the expected malicious attachments or dangerous links. Overall, spam levels grew by 2.3 percentage points from August to reach 72.5% of all email traffic, and phishing mails tripled, to reach 0.03%.
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