Driven by Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, spam in email traffic rose 1.4 percent in June and averaged 71.1 percent, Kaspersky Lab said on Monday.
Malicious attachments were found in 1.8 percent emails, decreasing 1 percent compared to the previous month.
Kaspersky said the heading of the unsolicited email invited the recipient to get to know the secret of Steve Jobs’ success, but the body of message contained an advert for free training sessions.
Its organizers promised in just 1.5 hours to teach everybody how to make a profitable business out of a hobby. Steve Jobs was used to attract attention to the training.
In addition to the offers of training courses promising to disclose the secret of Steve Jobs’ success, in June there were spam messages offering huge discounts on Apple devices.
The scammers entered the name of the company in the From field, though the email address has nothing to do with Apple. These emails stressed that there was a limited quantity of goods and it was essential to snap them up right away. This trick was used to encourage the user to take a decision quicker and thus to click the link and order the goods.
Admission to US universities and offers of online education at the user’s convenience were another theme exploited by spammers.
These emails included links to pages with application forms for the course. Interestingly, the addresses of the web pages vary from email to email and are often created on the day the mailing is sent. This is probably how the authors of the mass mailing collect personal user data.
In June, more than half of the world’s spam originated from China (24 percent) and the US (17 percent). South Korea came 3rd with 14 percent of distributed spam.
South Korea remained the leading source of spam sent to European users (53.3 percent): its share grew by 9.6 percentage points. The US (4.6 percent) and Vietnam (3.7 percent) moved down to 4th and 5th positions yielding to Italy (6.7 percent) and Taiwan (5 percent) respectively. Italy’s figure grew by 3.9 percentage points compared with May when this country was only 7th in the rating.
Malicious attachments were found in 1.8 percent of all emails. As in the previous month, the scammers often used their favorite trick – notifications sent on behalf of well-known companies.
In June, the number of attacks targeting Email and IMS increased drastically, because in the summer holidays the number of e-mail users and the users of such programs as ICQ, Jabber, Skype, etc grows. There is substantial demand for accounts of this type on the black market, which encourages phishers to try to grab login details for them.
