32.1% of phishing attacks targeted social networks, reports Kaspersky Lab

As per the latest report by Kaspersky Lab to check spammer activity for 2013, it has been revealed that the proportion of spam in email traffic continues to fall. In the last three years, the share of unsolicited messages has fallen by 10.7 percentage points. It appears that advertisers increasingly prefer various types of legitimate online advertising that are now available and which generate higher response rates at lower costs than spam can offer.   

The key findings of the report found that in some spam categories commercial advertising is being gradually displaced by criminal mailings such as spam messages advertising illegal goods or pornography.

Darya Gudkova, Head of Content Analysis, Kaspersky Lab, commented, “For the third year in a row, the most prevalent malware spread by email were programs that attempted to steal confidential data, usually logins and passwords for Internet banking systems. At the same time, however, phishing attacks are shifting from bank accounts to social networking and email. This can be partly explained by the fact that today’s email accounts often give access to a lot of content, including email, social networking, instant messaging, cloud storages and sometimes even a credit card.”

From the report, Asia accounted for 55.5% of the world’s spam in 2013 (an increase of 5.3 percentage points compared to 2012), followed by North America with 19% (+ 3.2 points). Eastern Europe’s share almost doubled compared to the previous year, placing the region in third with 13.3%. Western Europe remains in the fourth place despite a decrease of 2.4 percentage points, while the share of Latin America in the fifth place amounted to a threefold drop compared to 2012.