Spammers get back to business

According to Kaspersky Lab’s January spam report, it was business as usual for spammers last month. This came after a dramatic decline following the anti-spam campaign run at the end of last year. Pharmaceutical spam topped the list, which was closely followed by spam offering personal finance.

According to January’s statistics, pharmaceutical spam came first in the rating of the most popular spam categories. It has reclaimed its former leadership status after its dramatic decline following the robust anti-spam campaign of last year. The spammers clearly do not want to give up such a profitable side of their business. In second place was the Personal Finance category dominated by sites offering cheap loans and help finding work via recruitment agencies. The Fake Designer Goods category, which topped the rating in December, dropped to third place in January.

India, Russia and Italy maintained their leading positions among the most popular sources of spam with their contribution to the world’s spam traffic remaining almost unchanged from December. The amount of spam emanating from India stood at 9%. Russia came second having distributed 8.2% of spam with 5% originating in Italy.

Top figures to know:

· The amount of spam in email traffic increased by 0.5 percentage points compared to December and averaged 77.6%.

· Phishing emails accounted for 0.03% of all mail traffic, a decrease of 0.11 percentage points compared to the previous month.

¬∑ Malicious files were found in 2.75% of all emails, an increase of 1 percentage point compared to December’s figure.

For spammers, December and January was a time of gradual recovery from the anti-spam and anti-botnet campaigns which had such a significant impact on their capabilities. Unfortunately, they have been quite successful at restoring their botnets and if no new incidents affect the world of spam in the near future, the volume of unsolicited messages in mail traffic could reach summer 2010 levels by spring.

The full version of the spam report for January 2011 is available at www.securelist.com