Spam in Q3 2013: Malicious spam grew more than 1.5 times

As per a recent update, the percentage of spam in total email traffic during the third quarter of the year came to 68.3%, down 2.4 percentage points from the second quarter. Meanwhile, the proportion of malicious spam grew more than 1.5 times. The majority of malicious programs distributed via email targeted user logins, passwords and confidential financial information.

Compared to the previous quarter, Q3 2013 saw the level of phishing emails increase threefold. Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen topped the rating of the most popular malicious program spread by email.

The third quarter of 2013 was full of newsworthy events which grabbed public attention. All this news was used by fraudsters to distribute malware. The links contained in these emails led to compromised websites which redirected users to a page with one of the most popular exploit kits Blackhole.

In the third quarter we came across a very interesting mass mailing where the fraudsters imitated a reply from the technical support service of a large antivirus company. The email informed the user that a file which he had allegedly sent for analysis turned out to be malware. The ‘technical support engineer’ attached a ‘signature’, advising that it would disinfect the computer. However, if users opened the attachment, they would find a malicious program detected by Kaspersky Anti-Virus as Email Worm.Win32.NetSky.q., commented Darya Gudkova, Head of Content Analysis & Research at Kaspersky Lab.

Asia remained the number one regional source of spam (56.51%). It was followed by North America (20.09%) and Western Europe (13.47%).