Australian spam rates higher than global average

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 08:12

Business IT - Security

Spam levels in Australia are going through the roof, increasing by two percent to 92.7 percent of all emails received by business, and higher than the global average.

In its latest worldwide MessageLabs Intelligence report, Symantec says that spam rates in Australia are still higher than the global average of 88.1 percent, and the security firm also says that Australian virus activity rates more than doubled in October compared to September.

According to Symantec, one in 277.5 emails received by Australian users in October contained a virus.  This compares to one in 626.5 in September.

Globally, Symantec reports that its analysis reveals an increase in seasonally-themed spam including Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Valentine’s Day, as well as a surge in phishing attacks related to tax deadlines in the UK and Australia.

The security firm says that in mid-October it began seeing Halloween themed spam messages accounting for .5 percent of all spam increasing steadily and peaking at 500 million emails circulating worldwide daily as the holiday draws closer.

Also in October, according to Symantec, phishing runs purporting to be from the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) in the US and HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) in the UK experienced a surge.
 
“Interception of IRS phishing emails peaked on October 10 accounting for 67 percent of all phishing emails in a 24-hour period while HMRC phishing emails, peaking on October 13, accounted for 81 percent of all phishing interceptions that day, one of the largest ever HMRC phishing runs,” MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst, Paul Wood, said.

According to Wood, “when it comes to phishing runs, we have seen a significant shift in the bad guys’ approach. Not only are they experimenting with different languages, they are also turning their attention to targeting online services like web-based email in addition to the financial sector.”

The reason, concludes Wood, “is likely due to the widespread use of email addresses used to authenticate other sites such as social networking, retailing and auction sites.”

Symantec also reports that in October, the global ratio of spam in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was 88.1 percent (1 in 1.1 emails), reflecting a 1.7 percent increase since September, while the global ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was one in 230.8 emails (0.43 percent) in October, an increase of 0.18 percent since September. In October, 19.2 percent of email-borne malware contained links to malicious websites, a decrease of 20.6 percent since September.