Spam Enjoys the Silly Season
Spam Enjoys the Silly Season
November 3, 2006: MessageLabs reports sudden increase in spam levels as spammers prepare for the silly season.
MessageLabs says the spam-sending Trojan named ‘SpamThru;’ could be responsible the sharp increase in spam. A second Trojan dubbed ‘Warezov’ has been another contributing factor and is one of the most aggressive Trojans MessageLabs has encountered all year.
The global ratio of spam in email traffic from new and unknown bad sources was 72.9 percent in the month of October. That’s an increase of 8.5 percent from September and sharpest rise in spam levels since January 2006.
In better news, October showed a slight decrease in the proportion of Phishing emails. Down 0.06 percent from the previous month, one in 190 emails comprised some form of Phishing attack. As a proportion of all email-borne threats, Phishing emails had a significant increase of 30.7 percent in the month of September. This has reportedly stabilised but is still causing a menace in inboxes across the world.
Meanwhile viruses continue to make their mark across the globe. While there has been a slight decrease, about 1.0 percent of email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources contained viruses.