According to a latest report generated by Kaspersky Lab, the most popular personality for sending spam messages, over the past three months has been Barack Obama, President of the United States.
In the second quarter of the year, the report revealed that advertising is moving from spam into other venues: banner ads, social networks, contextual advertising, and coupon services. In Q3 2012, this trend remained in force, and the share of spam in total mail traffic fell by another 2.8 percentage points.
it is found; spammers are taking advantage of the growing popularity of new legitimate advertising venues. They are primarily doing so by sending out malicious emails designed to look like official notifications. Kaspersky Lab is seeing more and more malicious spam designed to look like coupon service notifications.
Kaspersky Lab already addressed the use of using coupons in spam in its Q2 2012 spam report. We are revisiting the issue of coupon spam in this report due to the emergence of malicious mailings in spam traffic designed to look like emails from the prominent coupon service Groupon.
Kaspersky Lab experts expected to see the appearance of this type of spam since coupons are very popular among Internet users and they trust coupon services. An email from a coupon service is an ideal disguise for malicious users.
Spam detection by country
The most remarkable change in the Top 10 countries where spam is detected in Q3 was Germany’s unexpected rise to first place (+3.8 percentage points).
The distribution of email antivirus spam detection by country in Q3 2012
The US, which has been in first place for eight months in a row, unexpectedly fell to 8th place in September, which affected the final results of the quarter. As a result, the percentage of spam detected in the US fell by 5.2 points from the second quarter, and took second place, just slightly behind Germany.
The percentage of spam detected in the UK fell by 1.7 percentage points (5th place), while Italy’s spam also dropped by 1.6 points, pushing that country out of the Top 10. The percentage of spam detected in the other Top 10 countries doesn’t exceed 1.5%. The changes in the proliferation of malicious code in Vietnam and Australia are a bit curious, as they were almost exactly the same over the past three months.
The percentage of spam detected in Australia and Vietnam: July-September 2012
Sources of spam by country and region
In Q3 2012, the percentage of spam emails sent from China and the US increased considerably (+6.7 and +15 percentage points respectively). In total, these two countries are responsible for more than half of all of the world’s spam.
The share of other countries dropped more or less proportionally.
Sources of spam by country, Q3 2012
Spam originating in China was sent primarily to the Asia-Pacific region, Australia, and Western Europe, while spam originating in the US was actively sent to the American continent, the Asia-Pacific region, and Australia. As far as Eastern Europe is concerned, the largest amount of spam came from India and Vietnam. India’s spam primarily targeted Western Europe, where the country took second place in the Top 10 sources of spam.
As for the regions where spam originates, thanks to the US, the region of North America rose significantly (+15 percentage points), while Asia’s percentage remained high, with nearly one-half of spam being sent from computers in that region. Western Europe pushed past Eastern Europe and took fourth place, approaching South America’s numbers.
Check out more IT News at itvoir.com