New figures released by German email security provider eleven has found that phishing email has seen a “significant” increase in the first quarter of 2012, with continued growth of country-specific malware and phishing campaigns.
Malware emails increased by 83.7% by the end of March and phishing email by a huge 169.9%, according to the eleven email security report for this month. March saw the biggest increase in phishing, which increased by 152.9% in this month alone.
Trends in phishing practices saw the continued increase in the amount of campaigns targeting specific countries and attachments contained doctored HTML or PDF files also experienced a jump in February and March.
Many of these came into inboxes disguised as bills from reputable companies such as Vodafone and once opened, activated Javascript which then contacted external servers in order to download malware to the affected machine.
Malware levels increased by 252.8% in February but declined slightly in March; however, an overall rise of 83.7% has been seen since December of last year.
The biggest culprits when it comes to malware-infecting email are versions of the Zeus/ZBot trojan, which made up over a third of all infections and the MyDoom worm, which accounted for 27.4%.