According to Kaspersky Lab’s spam report for May 2010, the USA maintained its positions as the prime distributor of spam, despite a decrease of 2.4% compared to March’s figure: the quantity of spam originating from this country increased by 8.5%, having returned to its usual level of 20.7%.
According to Kaspersky Lab’s spam report for May 2010, the USA maintained its positions as the prime distributor of spam, despite a decrease of 2.4% compared to March’s figure: the quantity of spam originating from this country increased by 8.5%, having returned to its usual level of 20.7%. Second and third places respectively went to India with 7.5% and Russia with 5.4%.
May saw major shifts involving China (3.6%) and Brazil (3.7%) – these countries have started to slowly win back their positions. They are not in the Top 5 yet, but could be soon. The 4th and the 5th places in the Top 5 are occupied by Vietnam and the Republic of Korea with 4.8% and 4.1% respectively. Noticeable changes happened to spam flows coming from Germany and Italy, they dropped out of the Top 10 having distributed 2% less spam each compared with the previous month. Interestingly, there is a “newcomer” in May’s Top 20 – Argentina distributed 2.1% of the total volume of spam.
In May there were no major changes in the rating of the most popular spam categories compared to the previous month. The Medications and Health-Related Goods and Services category retained the lead for English-language spam. In May this category’s share averaged 30%, whilst for a time during the second half of the month it even exceeded 45-46% of the total amount of spam. The Computer Fraud category again came second, though the amount of this type of spam decreased slightly compared to April’s figure (-3%). Interestingly, fake DHL notifications abandoned by malicious code distributors have been taken up by fraudulent spam authors. The share of the Personal Finance category increased considerably (+5%) compared to the previous month and occupied 3rd place in May’s Top 10 most popular spam categories.
The number of links to phishing sites remained unchanged compared to April’s figure, accounting for 0.02% of all emails. PayPal, eBay, HSBC and Facebook remain the most popular targets for phishers, with 50.4% (-4.2%) for PayPal, 13.4% (+1.9%) for eBay, 8.5% (-1.1%) for HSBC and 6.9% (-1.8%) for Facebook.
The full text of the spam report for May 2010 is available at: www.securelist.com/en.
