In August, unsolicited emails made up 67.6% of all global email traffic, according toKaspersky Lab figures, which is 3.6% points lower than in July.
If that change is linked to the summer vacation season, then it was the most innocuous spammers that left town: the rate of phishingmessages rose more than 10 times compared to July, while the volume of spam messages containing malicious attachments rose 2.5 times, accounting for 5.6% of all email traffic.
The vacation season may have been winding down, but cybercriminals kept up a continuous bombardment of fake messages announcing non-existent airline and hotel reservations, with the spammers using some of the biggest names in these industries.
The fact that such messages often look genuine can relax the recipient's vigilance. They usually prompt the user to open a malicious attachment or follow a link that initiates a file download to the hard drive. In either case, the victim computer is infected with the Tepfer Trojan that steals user credentials.
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If that change is linked to the summer vacation season, then it was the most innocuous spammers that left town: the rate of phishingmessages rose more than 10 times compared to July, while the volume of spam messages containing malicious attachments rose 2.5 times, accounting for 5.6% of all email traffic.
The vacation season may have been winding down, but cybercriminals kept up a continuous bombardment of fake messages announcing non-existent airline and hotel reservations, with the spammers using some of the biggest names in these industries.
The fact that such messages often look genuine can relax the recipient's vigilance. They usually prompt the user to open a malicious attachment or follow a link that initiates a file download to the hard drive. In either case, the victim computer is infected with the Tepfer Trojan that steals user credentials.
Read More