Moscow-based computer security company Kaspersky Lab has revealed that based on the number of email antivirus detections that users are faced with malicious emails, the US (10.1%) was at the top spot in August with 10.1% of all such mails worldwide.
Russia (8.96%), the UK (7.36%), Germany (5.45%) and India (5.1%) completed the top five list the company said in its spam report for August 2011.
Kaspersky said that the volume of spam in mail traffic decreased slightly compared to July and averaged 80% and cybercriminals are increasingly using business emails to lure users to open the malware laden email.
Kaspersky Lab Senior Spam Analyst Maria Namestnikova said that most users do not expect to find malware in business emails.
She said, "Erotic photos of girls ‘waiting to meet you’ can be found all over the Internet, while a company’s internal documents are more likely to pique an Internet user’s interest."
"After all, how many people are going to sleep soundly after they delete an email that appears to have come from the police asking the recipient to print out details of a driving offence and send it to a municipal court," Namestnikova asked.
The company also revealed several new tricks for spreading malicious code that were registered in August and said that in August, malicious files were found in 5.9% of all emails — a rise of 1.2 percentage points compared to July.
