Over the past few months, a major shift has been seen in malware activity, with a significant climb in email-borne malware and the highest observed in over two years. After years of low-volume attacks, malware email outbreaks reached a new high of 25 billion messages in one day in August of this year and the average daily email malware was up 400%.
Sendmail is a proud partner of Commtouch, a leading security company and service provider with cloud-based Internet security services. A recent report by Commtouch, “Internet Threats Trend Report,” published in October, identified the huge outbreaks of email malware in Q3 2011, looked at compromised accounts, Facebook and other hot spots for malware. For this report, Commtouch conducted a survey with end-users whose email accounts had been abused and the results (pdf)of the study indicate that 62% of users did not know how they were hacked, and that two-thirds of the hacked accounts were used to send spam or scams. The study found that in Q3, there was an average of 93 billion daily spam/phishing emails sent.
Ultimately, their findings show a large shift in how spam is being distributed, and spammers are increasingly relying on legitimate webmail accounts that have been hacked or hijacked. In addition to Webmail accounts, Facebook has become prime territory for scammers. The use of these accounts for malware is expected to rise, and users should be careful when accessing these in public domains and protecting their passwords.
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