Spam still the majority of email – malicious attachments on the rise

by Steve Ragan - Oct 12 2009, 07:17

In the October State of Spam report, Symantec notes that at 86-percent, the bulk of all email sent across the globe is Spam. However, while that comes as no surprise to many, the increase in malicious attachments might. According to the report, there was a nine fold increase in malicious email attachments from August to September.

Specifically, at its peak, there was a 4.5-percent rise in malicious email attachments in September, Symantec said.  On average, 1.3-percent of all September emails were malicious.

“While the single digit increase may seem relatively small at first, the consequences of this rise is quite significant when you consider that 86.39-percent of all email messages in September 2009 were Spam,” the report notes.

The rise in malicious email came with a perk for the most part, it was easy to detect. Thanks to the coverage gained by the IRS related scams with attachments, and the order tracking email scams with attachments, IT teams were able to filter them out before they reached end users.

The IRS emails and the order tracking scams came in first and fifth respectively on the list of the top ten Spam subjects. The trend of using error notices dominated the list, with the second through fourth spots going to error message related junk mail such as failure notice and Delivery Status Notification (Failure).

“The prominence of these subject lines corresponded with an increase in NDR bounce spam. While NDR bounce spam continues to average at 6.14 percent of all spam in September 2009, which is an increase of 0.4 percent from August 2009, it is the emergence of malware related subject lines including “Notice of Underreported Income” and “Thank you for setting the order No.475456” that is significant,” the report said.

Another observation in the October report is that Russian Spammers kept a short work week in September. According to Symantec, Spam from the Russians usually arrived Monday through Wednesday. You can’t blame them, most of their Spam tricks never work, and who wouldn’t want a four day weekend?

Job related Spam also remains steady, with crooks advertising education and placement programs aimed at mostly stable sectors. Among the top Spammed careers are Police Officer, Federal Agent, Nursing, and Teaching.

The entire State of Spam report for October is online here.

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