Email Security

To Russia With Love: Kaspersky Report Shows Russia Received Most Malware in May

Kaspersky Lab, in its most recent spam report for May 2011, revealed that across its user base, Russia has taken the number one position in terms of the quantity of malware detected in emails by antivirus software. According to Kaspersky’s data, Russia overtook the United States, where the quantity of malware infected emails received fell by 3.5 percent. The most widespread malware distributed via email was the Trojan-Spy program Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen.

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<p><strong>Kaspersky Lab</strong>, in its most recent spam report for May 2011, revealed that across its user base, Russia has taken the number one position in terms of the quantity of malware detected in emails by antivirus software. According to Kaspersky’s data, Russia overtook the United States, where the quantity of malware infected emails received fell by 3.5 percent. The most widespread malware distributed via email was the Trojan-Spy program Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen.

Kaspersky Lab, in its most recent spam report for May 2011, revealed that across its user base, Russia has taken the number one position in terms of the quantity of malware detected in emails by antivirus software. According to Kaspersky’s data, Russia overtook the United States, where the quantity of malware infected emails received fell by 3.5 percent. The most widespread malware distributed via email was the Trojan-Spy program Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen. Worms like Email-Worm.Win32.Mydoom.m, Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.gt and Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.q all remained high in the ratings, while newcomers included two Trojan-Downloader.Win32.FraudLoad Trojans.

Symantec, in its May 2011 Intelligence Report showed that as the overall spam level increased in May 2011, Russia became the most spammed geography, with a spam rate of 82.2%, but marked the UK as the country with the highest virus rate in emails at a rate of 1 in 91.7. Why the disparity? Due to Kaspersky Lab’s large footprint in Russia (Kaspersky Lab is a Moscow based company), it has a large marketshare compared to other regions of the world, and is thus likely seeing more activity across its customer base in the region. Experiencing 38% worldwide growth from 2009 to 2010, Kaspersky Lab generated 66 percent of its revenue from Europe and EEMEA.

According to Kaspersky Lab, in May, spammers tapped hot topics in the news to deceive users. In particular, Kaspersky notes, a surge in the number of messages exploiting the news of the death of Osama bin Laden was seen.

The most marked changes took place in the ratings of web services attacked the most with the use of phishing emails. 4.67 per cent of all phishing emails were intended to steal passwords for the popular free online game RuneScape. As a result, this platform made its debut in the top-ten straight in at No. 3 – way ahead of World of Warcraft – the most popular online game in the world. RuneScape is also of interest to cybercriminals, as it has access to user details of the popular social networking site, Facebook. The overall leader in the rating remained the payment system PayPal, which saw a small rise in the number of phishing emails (23.28 per cent on the figure for April 2011).

The full version of the Kaspersky Lab spam activity report for May 2011 is available here.

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