Overall spam in email traffic during the third quarter of 2013 dropped by 2.4 percentage points to 68.3%, when compared to the second quarter, a new Kaspersky report revealed.
However, the amount of malicious spam rose more than 1.5 times, with majority of them being distributed via email targeted user logins, passwords and confidential financial data.
During Q3, phishing mails rose by a threefold with Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen leading the rating of the most popular malicious programme spread via email.
Kaspersky Lab content analysis & research head Darya Gudkova said that during the quarter there were very interesting mass mailing where the fraudsters imitated a reply from the technical support service of a large antivirus company.
"The email informed the user that a file which he had allegedly sent for analysis turned out to be malware," Gudkova said
"The ‘technical support engineer’ attached a ‘signature’, advising that it would disinfect the computer.
"However, if users opened the attachment, they would find a malicious program detected by Kaspersky Anti-Virus as Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.q.."
The news of birth of the royal baby in the UK, the FBI hunt for Edward Snowden and the railway accident in Spain have allowed fraudsters to distribute malware, which led users to compromised websites that sent users to a page with Blackhole exploit kit.
Regionally, Asia topped the list of source of spam with 56.51%, followed by North America (20.09%) and Western Europe (13.47%).
