Europe Leads In Spam Growth For first Half Of 2010
Posted by Mike Sachoff
During the first half of 2010 Europe saw the most spam growth, bypassing North America, South America, and Asia-Pacific to earn the “Top Producer of Spam” title, according to a new report from Trend Micro.
Commercial, scams-based and health/medical categories make up 65 percent of the spam generated throughout the world, with HTML spam being the most commonly used technique by spammers.
According to the report, malicious URLs increased from 1.5 billion in January to over 3.5 billion in June. North America sourced the most malicious URLs, while Asia-Pacific had the most victims of malware infections.
India and Brazil distinguished themselves by having the most botted computers, tools of choice by cybercriminals building botnets for distributing malware, perpetrating attacks and sending spam. Botnet herders – the cybercriminals behind the botnets — earn millions of dollars in money stolen from innocent computer users.
Vulnerabilities in applications have always been a part of the security landscape. In the first half of 2010, Trend Micro threat researchers report a total of 2,552 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures published, with many more that are privately reported to vendors and therefore not published externally.
For end users, vulnerabilities have facilitated “drive-by” threats, where all that is necessary to become infected by malware is to visit a compromised website. Servers are coming under attack as well, with cybercriminals exploiting un-patched vulnerabilities. While this may be more difficult than compromising a single user system, the potential reward for cybercriminals is greater.
About the Author: Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.
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