The number of emails containing malicious files has increased 50%, accounting for 4.4% of the total mail traffic in July 2012, according to a report by Kaspersky Lab.
According to the report, the total share of spam fell by 0.1% points and averaged 71.8% throughout July.
Economic crisis was the primary theme in the spams during the month, with majority of offers registered in the personal finance category were advertisement for seminars on coping with the crisis and offer of goods "anti-crisis prices".
Spanish spam appeared with messages promoting investments in real estate as a way of safeguarding money to deal with economic downturn.
The holy month of Ramadan also led to rise the span with with a several offers by restaurants and messages offering various Muslim goods, including a "mobile Koran".
Spammers used Olympic theme during the Olympics Games with fraudulent messages about lottery wins and offers to buy tickets for Olympic events.
The geographical distribution of spam traffic did not undergo any significant changes in July.
Regionwise, Asian countries continued to account increased spam spread in Europe, with 62% of European spam originating in Asia. Almost a quarter of the spam distributed in the US also came from Asia countries.
Kaspersky Lab senior spam analyst Maria Namestnikova said the proportion of malicious attachments in email traffic increased one and a half times last month.
"On top of the 4.4% of email traffic containing malicious attachments there is also spam that contains malicious links and fraudulent messages," Namestnikova said.
