More than one in every 400 emails sent between July and September this year was a malicious spam message. The figure for the previous 3 months, April to June, was a little over one in every 3,300 revealing a staggering sharp rise in spamware.
Malicious spam emails are a scary concept as we wrote in our Antivirus Aids Spam Fight article less than two weeks ago. This is where spam messages are laden with attachments carrying Trojans and viruses attempting to infect your computer. If they succeed (by getting past your antivirus defences and convincing you to open them) they turn your computer into a spam zombie which then sends more spam on behalf of the spammer. That’s if you’re lucky. Some malicious spam messages will infect your computer and attempt to steal your private data, including credit card and online banking details. Others will steal other personal information which can be used to forge your identity.
The reason for the steep rise in malicious spam levels is because of a recent spate of malicious spam emails. Specifically, two big malware spam attacks earlier this year, the Penguin Panic Trojan (responsible for 27% of malicious spam) and the Win32/Haxdoor Trojan (responsible for 12% of malicious spam), caused huge surges in the numbers of spamware blocked. This also represents a significant change in direction for spammers as spamware had previously almost exclusively attempted to zombify computers to use them in the propagation of spam. With the Penguin Panic Trojan attacking iPhones, evidence suggests that spammers are changing tact and looking for new platforms to exploit, including social networking communities like Facebook.
Most spam is still being produced in the USA (almost 20%), with the usual suspects of China, Brazil, Russia, India, Italy, Argentina, Italy, South Korea, Turkey and now Thailand and Columbia also sending significant amounts of spam.
