Q3 Threats and Trends

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Recently Commtouch published its Q3 2009 Internet Threat Trends Report, which is based on the analysis of over two billion email messages and Internet transactions seen daily in the company’s cloud-based global detection centers.

According to the report:

  • An average of 332,000 zombies were newly activated each day for the purpose of malicious activity.
  • Spam levels averaged 83 percent of all email traffic throughout the quarter, peaking at 97 percent in July and bottoming out at 71 percent in August.
  • Email-borne malware that bypassed traditional anti-virus engines peaked every 11 to 13 days during the second half of the quarter, dominated by Mal-Bredo A and Mal Behav-340, of which over 10,000 distinct variants were distributed.
  • Sites in the “Health & Medicine” and “Sex Education” categories topped the list of Web categories manipulated by phishing schemes.
  • “Business” continued to be the Web site category most infected with malware.
  • The financial crises and the debate around health care reform in the U.S. have shaped recent spam trends.
  • Pharmacy spam returned to the top spot with 68 percent of all spam messages. Last quarter’s top spam subject “enhancements” fell from 46.2 percent to 11 percent of all spam messages during the quarter.
  • Brazil continues to produce the most zombies, responsible for 19.7 percent of global zombie activity.

While some published reports have claimed that phishing attacks have declined, Commtouch points out that comparing phishing data between organizations can be problematic because of the varying methods used to gather and compile data. For this reason, the company believes a broad, multi-vendor view of Web security trends, such as through its Commtouch Security Alliance, draws the most accurate picture of the Internet threatscape. 

“It is not only the absolute number of attacks which is important when examining phishing data, but also the sophistication of such attacks that causes data to vary from company to company. Small, targeted attacks can cause much more financial damage than less sophisticated large scale ones,” says Asaf Greiner, vice president of Web security at Commtouch. “In our examination of spam messages, which lure end-users to phishing sites, we see that there is not only great fluctuation in the volumes of attacks, but also great differences in the quality of them, which has a direct link to the likelihood of the attack to cause damage.”

Published November 9, 2009