83% of all email in March was spam says web security firm, who says attackers are using the World Cup as a way to target internet users.
“Spammers have abused big brand names to entice possible victims into clicking on URLs in messages,” said the company in its latest report that monitors how cyber criminals target their victims. “One such example we alerted on was an Apple App Store campaign. With this campaign, spammers abused the good reputation of legitimate sites to host their redirects. Compromised sites were linked in Apple App Store spam and would redirect to the final spam site destination. In some cases there were even client side exploits hosted on the redirect sites.”
Aside from using big brands to catch people out, spammers are also targeting .PDF files and next month’s World Cup.
“Riding on the PDF infection train, spammers also sent out targeted attacks containing infectious PDF files. The attacks consisted of FIFA World Cup themed messages with a PDF attachment. These attachments were laced with exploits intended to compromise the end user's computer.”
The highlights from March’s report were:
- 3.5 billion messages processed
- 10% of classified Web links within email were malicious
- 83.4% of all email was spam
- 93.7% of spam included an embedded URL
- 0.4% of spam emails where phishing attacks
- 1.1 million instances of 85 unique zero-day threats stopped by ThreatSeeker before AV
- 26% average daily threats protected using ThreatSeeker
- 99.5% spam detection rate
- 1 in 327,083 false positive rate
