In August, noticeable changes happened to the Top 20 prime distributors of spam. Hong Kong, which last month debuted in 17th place in July’s Top 20, unexpectedly appeared at 2nd place and was responsible for 7.7% of the total volume of spam distributed during August.
In August, noticeable changes happened to the Top 20 prime distributors of spam. Hong Kong, which last month debuted in 17th place in July’s Top 20, unexpectedly appeared at 2nd place and was responsible for 7.7% of the total volume of spam distributed during August. The USA maintained its leadership with 15.5% of the total amount of distributed spam and after a short break, the Netherlands and Canada reentered the Top 20.
One very noticeable change in the rating of organizations most frequently targeted by phishers was Facebook’s drop from 2nd to 9th place. The quantity of attacks on this resource fell by more than ten times compared to the previous month’s figure. It’s difficult to say what caused the cybercriminals’ huge loss of interest in this social network. Perhaps it might be the calm before the storm and the fraudsters’ interest will pick up again in the autumn.
At the same time, there were double the number of attacks targeting one of the Top 5 leaders, HSBC, whilst WoW moved up from 8th to 4th position.
The amount of bulk mails containing malware doubled during August. Such considerable growth is caused by the fact that in summer, the number of spammers’ clients in Russia and elsewhere decreased and many spammers used their botnets to distribute “partner” spam, including emails with malicious attachments.
The full spam report is available at: www.securelist.com.
