Friday, November 8, 2013

Published 10:21 PM by

The third quarter was a slight drop in spam

The third quarter was a slight drop in spam

In the third quarter of 2013, "Kaspersky Lab" noted reduction in the overall level of spam in mail traffic of 2.4%. However, the final figure of 68.3%, only 0.3% lower than the average for the first half, so to speak of a stable trend of decline in the share of spam in email is not necessary. In addition, for the period from July to September is 3 times the share fishinovyh letters, as well as significantly increased the level of messages with malicious attachments - up to 3.9%, which is one and a half times more than in the previous period.

As noted by analysts of "Kaspersky Lab "the most creative in the third quarter of 2013 were spammers, promoting, perhaps the most famous product of the spammer advertising - a means to increase potency. The letters on similar subjects were used as tricks to bypass filters and techniques of social engineering. For example, in one of the mailing lists, spammers have taken the following trick: in the subject header they indicated a word that looked like Viagra, that's just made ​​up that word was the most different symbols used, including a very rare and even dead languages. Combining hundreds of different signs, eye catchy word can be written to hundreds of millions of ways - and each of these sets of characters will not cause suspicion among the spam filters, and the recipient will easily recognize the advertised goods so.   detected malicious emails in the third quarter of 2013, mainly with the simulated distribution news resources, good reasons for this were many: and the birth of a child from the UK royal couple, and the FBI hunt for Edward Snowden, and the accident on the railway in Spain.

 References in all such letters were predictably to hacked sites that redirect the user to a page with one of the most popular sets of exploits - Blackhole. In the case of this vulnerability exploit downloaded to your computer, several malicious programs, including Trojans, spyware, stealing personal data. Meanwhile, leader of the rating the more common e-mail traffic of malware in the third quarter by a wide margin was the Trojan Spy.HTML. Fraud.gen, which is an HTML-page, mimicking the registration form on-line banking service. With this malware scammers steal financial information users. third quarter of 2013 was a record year in the number of spam emails short - their share has reached 80% of the total e-mail traffic. Throughout the year, the experts "Kaspersky Lab" noted that each quarter of letters of no more than one kilobyte is growing. And the third quarter confirmed this trend. Today, most spam messages almost no text, spammers are placed only link that usually leads to a site-redirector service or short links.

These e-mails, on the one hand, complicate the work of the spam filters, and on the other, due to the small size can be quickly sent out in huge numbers. Regarding phishing, during July, August and September 2013 attackers traditionally most often counterfeited notice the different social networks. In addition, the center of their attention got mail and search services. Totally on these three categories accounted for more than 60% of all phishing attacks from the TOP-100 attacked organizations.

This impressive figure confirms that the monetization of phishing occurs largely through the sale of stolen accounts, which, in turn, can be used to send spam on the contact list. leaders among the countries of spam, for the third quarter of 2013 to remain China (-0.9%), the USA (+1.2%) and South Korea (2.1%). Together, these three countries sent more than 55% of all spam in the world. , in turn, Russia has increased its stake in the rating of one and a half times, and eventually finished fifth. It is interesting that despite the increase in spam from Russia decreased the number of unsolicited messages sent from the former Soviet republics - Belarus (-0.9%), Ukraine (0.9%) and Kazakhstan (1.5%) - which the results of last quarter in the ranking ahead of Russia. This may be caused, for example, that instead of one botneta spammers responsible for some rather large distribution began to use another.

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