PHL is among top spammers to US, Europe –Kaspersky Labs

This may not be a list the Philippines can take pride in topping.

 

Security vendor Kaspersky Lab said in its June 2012 spam report showed the Philippines was a top source of spam mail that hit the United States and Europe in that month.

 

Kaspersky said about 25 percent of the spam distributed in the US at the time came from Asia.

 

"The Philippines is one of the top sources of spam that hit U.S. and Europe during a number of significant events in June," it said.

 

It said the Philippines ranked seventh out of 20 countries with a share of 2.8 percent in spam distributed to the US.

 

Also, it said the U.S. was the main source of distributed spam at 39.2 percent, followed by China with 9.1 percent, Brazil with 6.6 percent and India with 3.7 percent.

 

In the report, the Philippines was tagged as one of the contributors of spam that led to an unexpected surge of spam percentage in the category of personal finance which almost tripled in size with 73.9 percent.

 

The second category was medications, health-related groups and services (10.6 percent), computer fraud (9.6 percent), adult content spam (3.5 percent), gambling (1.3 percent) and other categories (1 percent).

 

Spam: Slow downward trend in US

 

Kaspersky Lab senior spam analyst Maria Namestnikova noted a "slow downward trend" in spam in June, which could be partially attributed to a seasonal “summer” fluctuation.

 

This is where spam bot computers were being turned off by their owners for the holiday.

 

But Kaspersky noted spammers targeted the July 4th Independence Day celebration, offering fake designer watches and other accessories as gift ideas.

 

There were also mass mailings advertising flags to help Americans express their patriotic feelings.

 

“We would like to draw your attention to the fact that during the summer holidays spammers tend to focus on children and students and the services they use – social networking sites and online stores. Teenagers should be aware of the risks that lie in wait for them on the Internet. At the very least, parents need to make sure their children have enough knowledge about IT security so they don’t pass on credit card data to cybercriminals while shopping online,” Namestnikova  said.

 

PHL: 19th of 20 top sources of spam in Europe

 

Also, the Philippines ranked 19 among the top 20 countries that are sources of spam to Europe.

 

But the Philippines’ share is just 0.8 percent of the total, compared to China’s 36.6 percent, India's 12.6 percent and the US' 4.9 percent.

 

The main target for spammers in Europe was the European Football Championship 2012, the biggest sporting event in the region that the entire month of June.

 

Various spam offerings were sent out related to Euro 2012, from travel offers, Nigerian letter-styled lottery, and online streaming of the games.

 

On the other hand, the amount of spam in emails decreased to 1.9 percentage points compared to May and averaged 71.9 percent.

 

Malicious files

 

Malicious files were also found in 3 percent of all emails, an increase of 0.2 percentage points compared with the month of May.

 

Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen led the most number of malware attached to email accounting for more than 10% of all detections.

 

It is followed by Packed.Win32.Katusha.o. Also, mail worms still dominate malwares in terms of detection, which is not surprising considering their uncontrolled mechanism of self-distribution.

 

Three newcomers to the Top 10 malicious programs spreading via email in June belong to the Trojan.Win32.Androm family such as Trojan.Win32.Androm.py occupied the 4th place, Trojan.Win32.Androm.ow ranked fifth and Trojan.Win32.Androm.ni eighth.

 

Once these malicious programs are installed on a computer, they start downloading other malware from the Internet.

 

The proportion of phishing emails remained unchanged from May’s figure, accounting for 0.01% of all mail traffic.

 

Social networking sites have again become the primary target with 25.2 percent share of all targets and Facebook is still their prime target. — TJD, GMA News