Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, has released its latest report on the evolution of spam for the first quarter of 2010 compiled by company experts Darya Gudkova, Elena Bondarenko and Maria Namestnikova.
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, has released its latest report on the evolution of spam for the first quarter of 2010 compiled by company experts Darya Gudkova, Elena Bondarenko and Maria Namestnikova. As is stated in the report, the number of phishing attacks on social networking sites has increased. Facebook unexpectedly became one of the most popular targets for the phishers. “This was the first time since we started monitoring that attacks on a social networking site have been so prolific,” stated the report’s authors.
Top 10 organizations targeted by phishing attacks
The percentage of phishing emails in the first quarter of 2010 averaged 0.57% of the total volume of mail traffic.
Spammers have learnt to exploit the new Internet platforms such as blogs and social networks for their own ends. The saturation of the spam market has led to a halt in the growth of the volume of unwanted emails in mail traffic, having stabilized at around 85.2% in the first quarter of 2010. This figure coincides with the final result for 2009.
The first quarter saw no major changes to the list of countries considered to be key sources of spam: the US was first (16%) followed by India (7%) and then Russia (6%).
The migration of spammers from China’s .cn domain to the Russian .ru zone is another noticeable event that occurred in the first quarter of 2010. This was caused by a tightening of the domain registration rules in China. Russian domains are attractive to the fraudsters because of their more relaxed legal requirements.
The full text of the report for Q1 is available at: www.securelist.com/en.
