India, Brazil Most Popular Sources of Spam in April 2011

By | July 1, 2011

According to the Kaspersky Lab spam report, in April 2011, India and Brazil are the most popular sources of spam. India accounted for 12.76% of the total volume of spam, followed by Brazil with 7.15%.

In April, the amount of spam in email traffic increased by 1.2 % points and averaged 80.8% when compared to March 2011. The average figure exceeded 83.6% in the second half of April 2011, which indicates that the share of unsolicited mail will continue to grow in the coming months.

South Korea contribution to global spam almost doubled when compared to the month of March 2011 figure. Russia was overtaken by South Korea and continued its slide down the rating of most popular spam sources. In April, the viruses which appeared the most are “Packed.Win32.Katusha.n” and “Trojan-Downloader.Win32.FraudLoad.hxv” in the rating of malicious programs blocked by mail anti-virus. These malicious programs are linked to fake AV: the former is used to pack them while the latter down loader them to users’ computers. Malicious files were found in 3.65% of all emails, which shows an increase of 0.43% points in April 2011 when compared to the month of March 2011.

USA is in top place in terms of malware which was detected most frequently in mail traffic. Followed by Russia and UK, USA recorded an increase of 1.93% points and Russia decreased by 2.9% when compared to March.

In April 2011, phishers did not show any interest in eBay as almost half of its users were attacked compared to March. In the top 10 rating of ‘organizations most often targeted in phishing attacks’, eBay fell two places to 4th place with the subsequent drop of 4.2% points. PayPal was leading in this regard in April’s rating. However, the intensity of the attacks on PayPal too decreased, with a drop of 6 percentage points compared to March. Though there was only slight increase in the number of attacks, Facebook and Santander moved up to 2nd and 3rd respectively.