Bulk mails are becoming more malicious

According to Kaspersky Lab’s reports there was a notable change in the Top 20 prime distributors of spam in the month of August.

Hong Kong, which last debuted in 17th place in July’s Top 20, unexpectedly appeared at 2nd place and was responsible for 7.7% of the total volume of spam distributed during August. The USA maintained its leadership with 15.5% of the total amount of distributed spam and after a short break, the Netherlands and Canada re-entered the Top 20.

According to Kaspersky Lab’s report, One very noticeable change in the rating of organisations most frequently targeted by phishers was Facebook’s drop from 2nd to 9th place. The quantity of attacks on this resource fell by more than ten times compared to the previous month’s figure. It’s difficult to say what caused the cybercriminals’ huge loss of interest in this social network.

At the same time, there was double the number of attacks targeting one of the Top 5 leaders, HSBC, whilst WoW moved up from 8th to 4th position.

The amount of bulk mails containing malware doubled during August. Such considerable growth is caused by the fact that in summer, the number of spammers’ clients in Russia and elsewhere decreased and many spammers used their botnets to distribute ‚partner‚ spam, including emails with malicious attachments.

The full spam report is available at: www.securelist.com