Spam plague in February and more to come: Symantec

Global spam volume grows by 25 per cent

Spam levels in Hong Kong reached 90.6 per cent and virus activity in China was the highest in the world in February, according to Symantec's latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report.

In Singapore, one out of every 319.2 e-mails contained a virus in a period when the total spam volume globally increased by about 25 per cent.

The research revealed a surge in spam levels in February 2010 to make up 89.4 per cent of all e-mails, an increase of 5.5 per cent from January with pharmaceutical spam now accounting for 65 per cent of the total.

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Spam levels in Hong Kong reached 90.6 per cent and virus activity in China was the highest in the world in February, according to Symantec's latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report.

In Singapore, one out of every 319.2 e-mails contained a virus in a period when the total spam volume globally increased by about 25 per cent.

The research revealed a surge in spam levels in February 2010 to make up 89.4 per cent of all e-mails, an increase of 5.5 per cent from January with pharmaceutical spam now accounting for 65 per cent of the total.

In February, according to Symantec, the most spammed industry, with a spam rate of 93.1 per cent, was the engineering sector.

Spam levels for the education sector were 90.8 per cent, 89.3 per cent for the chemical and pharmaceutical sector, 89.8 per cent for IT services, 91.1 per cent for retail , 87.6 per cent for the public sector and 88.4 per cent for finance.

Public sector targeted

In February, the public sector remained the most targeted industry for malware with one in 88.1 e-mails being blocked as malicious.

The Symantec report said much of the increase in spam emanated from the Grum and Rustock botnets, particularly relating to a Canadian pharmacy-style spam run.

"Whether the spammers are trying to clear this spam run more quickly or have discovered that it is successful, they have certainly been using multiple botnets to distribute high-volume spam campaigns in February," said MessageLabs intelligence senior analyst, Paul Wood.

"The activities of this single spam operation have been driving recent global surges in spam rates and strongly impacting global spam levels in turn. Based on these latest spam patterns, we can predict additional surges in spam in the coming weeks."

Smaller sized e-mails

While spam volumes grew in February, the size of spam messages simultaneously shrank as did the number of spam e-mails containing attachments. In the past year, the number of attachments diminished from 10 per cent in April 2009, to less than one per cent in February 2010. The average file size of a spam e-mail has fallen from 5 kilobytes in October 2009 to 3.3 kilobytes in February 2010.

"Rather than attach images to emails directly," Wood said, "spammers are choosing to host the image online with a free image hosting service thus reducing the average file size of a spam email and enabling the botnets to send a greater volume of spam per minute."