MessageLabs Intelligence: October 2007--"MP3 Stock Spam Is Up...More Spammers Sent Down"

Overview

Top line results of this report include:

• Spam - 74.5% in October (an increase of 1% since September)
• Viruses - One in 161.5 emails in October contained malware (a decrease of 1.4% since September)
• Phishing - One in 174.0 emails comprised a phishing attack (a decrease of 0.6% since September)

October was a busy month for spam, especially as the volume of spam from new and unknown bad sources has risen by a further 1%. Over recent months, stock spammers have been toying with different types of file attachments, including text, images, ZIP, RAR and PDF spam, the most notable spam type which consisted of an Adobe Acrobat PDF document containing the spam message. The PDF spam messages have largely died out now, as it is unlikely that the spammers were reaping significant gains in hyping penny stocks.

See also: Security Management, Spam - E-mail Fraud - Phishing, Best Practices, Spyware