Spam emails on decline, malware still on high-rise: Kaspersky

Johannesburg – The total number of spam emails has reportedly declined in the third quarter of the year, but the malware is still running high, security company Kaspersky has revealed.

Kaspersky Labs said that the percentage of spam in total e-mail traffic amounted to 68.3 percent, down 2.4 percentage points from the second quarter, but the proportion of malicious spam grew more than 1.5 times.

The security company said that much of the malware targeted user information like logins, passwords and financial information, News24 reports.

According to Kaspersky, online criminals are targeting people in order to steal financial information or use their computers as part of a botnet to execute further attacks making the use of the compromised machines.

Head of Content Analysis and Research at Kaspersky Lab, Darya Gudkova revealed that there have been mass mailing in which fraudsters imitated a reply from the technical support service of a large antivirus company and the attachment turns out to be malware.

The report said that hackers also exploited news to send related spam, by directing users to compromised websites with an exploit known as Blackhole.

Kaspersky further revealed that South Africa, Denmark, Japan and Finland as countries with the lowest risk of online infection, while Vietnam, Russia and Kazakhstan users face the highest risk of having their computers infected online.