Computer security company Kaspersky Lab has said that online games were the most attrcative target for phishers in May.
In its new report on spam activity for May 2011, the company said that 4.67% of all phishing emails were intended to steal passwords for the popular free online game RuneScape. The gaming company is of interest to cybercriminals more than even user details of the popular social networking site Facebook, found the study.
However, the top target for phishers remained the payment system PayPal, which saw a small rise in the number of phishing emails, 23.28 percentage points up on the figure for April 2011.
Compared with the previous month, the volume of spam in email traffic increased 2.1 percentage points, making up on average 80.8% of the total, said the report.
The Moscow-based company said that spammers also used terrorism as a cover for cybercrime last month. It noted that a surge in the number of messages was detected exploiting the news of the death of Osama bin Laden. Such messages contained malicious files as well as links to legitimate payware.
Among countries, the report said that Russia has become the world leader in terms of the quantity of malware found in emails detected by antivirus programs. The US, formerly taking first place, now comes second.
The most widespread malware distributed via email was the Trojan-Spy program Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen.
Worms like Email-Worm.Win32.Mydoom.m, Email-Worm.Win32.Bagle.gt and Email-Worm.Win32.NetSky.q also remained high in the ratings, while newcomers included two Trojan-Downloader.Win32.FraudLoad Trojans, said the report.
