Spam in June 2013 up by 1.4%, reports Kaspersky Lab

Kaspersky Lab has revealed the report of “Spam in June 2013”, which showed that the percentage of spams in email traffic in June was up 1.4 percentage points and averaged 71.1%. Malicious attachments were found in 1.8% of all emails, a drop of 1 percentage point compared to the previous month.

In June, more than half of the world’s spams originated from China (24%) and the US (17%). South Korea came third with 14% of all distributed spams.

Last month, the spammers actively used the name of Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder. The heading of the unsolicited email invited the recipient to get to know the secret of the famous businessman’s success, but the body of message contained an advert for free training sessions. Its organizers promised in just 1.5 hours to teach everybody how to make a profitable business out of a hobby. Steve Jobs was used to attract attention to the training.

In June, spammers continued to use familiar tricks. In particular, we recorded several mass mailings advertising both conventional and electronic cigarettes where the organizers used the Google Translate service to process spam links. Moreover, the spammers added a randomly generated set of letters and names of Google domains in different languages to the end of links,” said Tatyana Shcherbakova, Senior Spam Analyst, Kaspersky Lab.

Malicious attachments were found in 1.8% of all emails. As in the previous month, the scammers often used their favourite trick  notifications sent on behalf of well-known companies.
In June, the number of attacks targeting Email and IMS increased tremendously, because in the summer holidays the number of e-mail users and the users of such programs grows.