The levels of spam with malware have spiked recently posing a more serious threat to email users than before.
The State of Spam report released by Symantec indicates that the numbers of spam with malicious attachments have gone up drastically since September. Senior Manager of Anti-spam Engineering for Symantec, Dylan Morss confirmed that there has been a definite increase in the percentage of emails containing viruses recently.
While the quantum of virus-infected spam normally stays at around 0.5% of all spam, the last couple of months since September have seen these levels go up to as much as 1.3%. In fact, the State of Spam report declared that malware was attached to nearly 4.5% of all spam at a particular time in September. On the whole, there’s been a nine-fold increase in spam with malware during September.
With spam comprising 86.39% of email traffic in September, the proportion of malicious spam becomes even more significant. Based on the report, the FBI issued three different warnings regarding the circulation of deceptive emails with malicious attachments. Some emails, which were rumored to be sent by the FBI, contained reports about weapons of mass destruction or Al-Qaeda financing. Other emails of this kind looked like they were sent by the US Department of Justice. These mails purportedly contained an audio file with a speech by Osama Bin Laden addressing the people of Europe.
The FBI also clarified that they do not send unsolicited mails and should users come across such mails, they should not open the attachments as they may be viruses or other malicious software.
When one considers the drastic increase in spam with attached viruses or malware, it is important to take the necessary precautions to steer clear of these hazards. This means never opening attachments sent by unknown individuals or organizations, keeping all your virus definitions up to date, and making it a point to scan all attachments for viruses before downloading anything.
With the amount of malware floating about the Internet growing exponentially, it’s probably also a good idea to safeguard your data by also backing it up on an external data disk.
Source: http://www.scmagazineus.com/Huge-uptick-in-spam-borne-malware-since-mid-September/article/151732/
