According to Kaspersky Lab data, the proportion of spam in email traffic grew by nearly 13 percentage points and averaged 71% for the month, higher than the average for January and the last three months of 2012. Spammers have come back to their work in February after a break of several months.
Fake notifications from different financial organizations remain one of the most popular tools for distributing malware via email. In February, Google had launched mass mailing that included the Google’s name notifying users that their resume was under consideration.
Darya Gudkova, Head of Content Analysis & Research, Kaspersky Lab, said, “Such a dramatic increase in the amount of spam in February hardly marks the beginning of a new trend. It was most probably caused by a decline in the share of junk email during the January holidays when many of the computers used in botnets to distribute spam were turned off. Moreover, the proportion of unsolicited messages in February was still slightly lower when compared with the average for the whole of 2012. They appear in the form of HTML pages imitating registration forms. Users should be especially careful with such emails and the attachments should not be opened; online banking pages should only be accessed via a browser.”
In February, South Korea was the main source of spam sent to European users: the volume of junk email originating from that country grew 27.7 percentage points and averaged 50.9%. Last month’s leader China (3%) fell to sixth place in February with a considerable drop of 36.6 percentage points.
