According to AppRiver, 2013 was a record breaking year in terms of spam and malicious message levels. During the last 12 months the cloud-based email and Web security specialist has trapped 28.3 billion spam messages in its filters, a 128 percent increase over the amount seen the previous year.
Spam messages containing malicious attachments that can prove exceptionally damaging and AppRiver’s statistics confirm this is still a popular infection vector having quarantined just over 479 million such messages.
In tandem, it has also seen a significant upward trend of malware delivered via malicious links. The US was once again identified as the highest ‘spam pusher’ with 4,871,761,291 messages.
Making its debut in the top ten, and going straight in at second place was Belarus with 2,035,771,417 messages, pushing India into third position with 1,560,528,465 messages.
When looking at levels for both spam and malicious email traffic it is Europe that claims the top spot responsible for 38% of traffic, Asia is second with 24.7%, closely followed by North America with 21%. AppRiver monitored a daily average of 4.3 million Web-based malware threats during 2013.
Fred Touchette, senior security analyst for AppRiver, advised, “The fact that spam and malicious messages is on the increase is a trend that started towards the end of 2012 and shows no sign of slowing.
As an illustration, in late October we began seeing a unique malware campaign that poses a threat to PC users, Android users and some IOS users alike. The messages pose as notifications from WhatsApp, attempting to lure the victim with a link to a “voice message”. Obviously that’s not what clicking the link delivers.
Instead it installs a malicious app that will secretly send text messages to premium numbers and the victim will be left holding the tab.
By distributing their malware in this fashion cyber-criminals can reach the masses and without having to get past app store safeguards. We have quarantined millions of these messages over the past several months but they are still coming in, which indicates that they must be “working” to an extent that is acceptable to the sender. Vigilance is the key to preventing these messages delivering their payloads.”
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