 Increase
in malicious spam in August.
03/09/2007 |
Figures, compiled by
Sophos, show a dramatic drop in malware spreading in the form of email
attachments, with just one infected message in every 1,000 emails in
August 2007, compared to one in 322 during the first six months of 2007.
Spam, however, has
continued to be a problem - much of it linking to malicious websites
designed to infect users. A series of large-scale attacks have been made
via spam email, directing users to infected webpages. People visiting
these infected webpages are running the risk of having their PCs infected
by malicious code which can then steal personal information, spam out more
malware and junk email, or launch distributed denial of service attacks
against innocent parties.
While more than
three quarters of infected webpages are hosted in just three countries
(China, the USA, and Russia) the proportion of infected pages hosted by
the Netherlands, Italy and Canada has increased with Ukraine almost
doubling the number of pages hosted in the last month. This doesn't mean
you only get hit if you visit websites based in those areas however, as
hackers are hijacking websites around the world to make them point to
malware on sites based in China, the USA, and Russia.
During August, an
average of 5,000 new infected webpages were discovered each day, compared
to 6,000 in July. There was also a sharp spike in spam activity in the
middle of August due to one of the world's biggest ever single spam
campaigns designed to manipulate stock prices.
Whilst many malware
writers seem to be taking a break from spreading malicious code via email
attachments they seem to be using spam and the web instead to infect
users. As they are hard at work trying to slip past filters at the
corporate gateway, we are hard at work ensuring that our security
solutions are kept up-to-date to protect our clients against new virus
variants and new spam techniques before they can strike.
Source:
Sophos
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