Spammers have stepped up activities after several months of decline, according to a report by Kaspersky Lab.
For the month of February, Kaspersky Lab have said the proportion of spam in email traffic grew by almost 13 per cent and averaged 71 per cent for the month.
This is higher than the average reported for January 2013.
Darya Gudkova, head of content analysis and research at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Such a dramatic increase in the amount of spam in February hardly marks the beginning of a new trend.
“It was most probably caused by a decline in the share of junk email during the January holidays when many of the computers used in botnets to distribute spam were turned off. Moreover, the proportion of unsolicited messages in February was still slightly lower when compared with the average for the whole of 2012. In any case, we don’t expect any more dramatic changes in the near future.”
Gudkova said what was of concern was the “malicious attachments” added to emails which are designed to “steal users’ credentials for online banking systems”.
Gudkova said: “They appear in the form of HTML pages imitating registration forms. Users should be especially careful with such emails and the attachments should not be opened; online banking pages should only be accessed via a browser.”
Italy seems to be the most targeted country as it is reported it received more malicious emails in February than any other country.
Kaspersky Lab reports that Italy’s share of mail anti-virus detections grew by 9.4 percentage points and averaged 14.4 per cent, pushing long-term leader the US into second place.
The most popular tool for distributing malware remains fake notifications from different financial organisations.
The full version of Kaspersky Lab’s Spam Report for February 2013 is available at securelist.com
