Spam accounted for more than eight in every ten emails received in September, reducing productivity for businesses worldwide as employees clear out their inboxes and often miss important messages.
Septembers email analysis by Websense found a return to an old trick of attaching a .scr file masquerading as a .pdf file using the “Here You Have” malicious email content from many months ago. This particular email message is tried and tested, with spam senders recycling methods and processes, in this case using an old ‘worm’ (virus) using different means.
Social engineering spam was prominent in September, with spammers last month sending messages reporting to be from social networks or popular web based services such as fake Skype-themed malicious and Facebook password reset emails. Last month saw a wave of LinkedIn spam emails that installed malware, at one time this particular email accounted for over 25 percent of all spam emails tracked by Cisco.
Websense’s ThreatSeeker September analysis also found:
- 11% of classified Web links within email were malicious
- 82.1% of all email was spam
- 84.9% of spam included an embedded URL
- 0.7% of spam emails where phishing attacks
- 186 thousand instances of 81 unique zero-day threats stopped by ThreatSeeker before AV
- 10.4% average daily threats protected using ThreatSeeker
- 99.7% spam detection rate
- 1 in 753,624 false positive rate
