The new year begins…
Phishing has increased and the number of viruses has doubled!! This is the highest percentage of viruses we have seen since last April. Spam has decreased - well originating from China that is, which is not due to less spammers…………
Below, we have the daily breakdown for ham, spam, viruses and phishing.
World of Spam
The volume per geographical location for spam, viruses and phishing emails for January can be seen below.
The spams statistics this month are down for the Asian countries, China especially. Usually China is in the top 3 but this month it has not made it into the top ten. An article in the Register explains why..
An earthquake, which occurred at the end of December, caused severe disruption to internet and telephone networks in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, and Japan, thus suspending spammers from sending spam this month, watch out next month!
Viruses: New Year -> new viruses
The family of Somefool has been knocked from its pedestal, and it barely in the top ten this month. Last month it was robbed of first place and with viruses stats doubling, the family Trojan-Downloader has taken control of the leader board.
The number one this month, Trojan.Downloader-648, is also known as Email-Worm.Win32.Zhelatin.a. This virus is sent as an email attachment. The attachment is a Windows PE EXE file and if it finds files with an .exe or a .scr extension on a victims machine, the virus copies itself to the directory where the file is located under a random name.
| Position | Virus | Percentage | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
Trojan.Downloader-648 |
|
23.55% | |
|
Trojan.Downloader-656 |
|
14.06% | |
|
Trojan.Downloader-747 |
|
11.48% | |
|
Trojan.Downloader-753 |
|
10.68% | |
|
Trojan.Downloader-758 |
|
8.02% | |
|
Trojan.Downloader-647 |
|
7.52% | |
|
Trojan.Downloader-659 |
|
6.97% | |
|
Trojan.Downloader-749 |
|
6.15% | |
 |
Worm.SomeFool.Gen-2 |
|
5.82% | |
|
Trojan.Downloader.TaberMartyn-112 |
|
5.75% | |
Phishing:
This month has seen major compromised accounts: approximately 60,000 usernames and passwords were obtained from MySpace users .Like Ebay phishing scam, it is rare to actually see how many users submit their details to a phishing scam and how successful phishing sites are.
Many organisations such as PayPal and eBay are adopting the extended validation ssl certificates, in a measure to counteract users thinking that phishing sites are the real site. Once the user clicks on the cert, the address bar will turn green and A special label will appear giving information regarding the website owner. In a study conducted, it showed that this EV ssl certificates made little or no difference to help users in distinguishing real sites from fraudulent ones.
