Malicious Spam Traffic Hits Record High in 3Q

In the third quarter, spam of all types represented an average of 82.3 percent of all email traffic and malicious spam surged to a record high of 4.6 percent of all email, according to a report from security software vendor Kaspersky Lab.

The more than doubling of spam emails containing malicious attachments from 1.9 percent last quarter to 4.6 percent this time around was mainly due to the closure of the SpamItpartner program in September that was and has been responsible for delivering "enormous volumes" of pharmaceutical spam this year, Kaspersky Lab researchers said in the report.

The report found that the SpamIt partner program websites, Spamit.biz and Spamit.com, did acknowledge shuttering their so-called partnership program with other would-be spammers for a number of reasons including the fact that MasterCard announced it would no longer execute payment transactions for medicine via the SpamIT partner program.

While that was good news for consumers and legitimate pharmaceutical sites, it was short-lived.

"Based on available data, the upswing in malicious mail traffic during late September appeared to be connected to the announcement of the shutdown of the prominent SpamIt partner program, which specialized in pharmaceutical spam," the report said. "Some of the spammers working with this program apparently switched to working with partner programs that send out mailings containing malicious code instead."

This proliferation of malicious spam, which includes attachments that are designed to trick people intosharing personal information, peaked at 6.3 percent of all email traffic in August.

Kaspersky Lab and other security software vendors are warning Internet users to be on the lookout for a variety of increasingly sophisticated malware traps that are or will use the upcoming holiday season and pop-culture events, such as the release of the new Harry Potter movie to lure people into clicking on the tainted links.

Similar scams using Facebook, eBay and Apple gift cards were among the most successful and damaging malware campaigns in the quarter
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