TrendLabs Researchers have reported that during the first half of 2010, Europe sped through the spam-generating fast-lane, bypassing North and South Americas, and Asia-Pacific to earn the "Top Producer of Spam" title. Based on the Trend Micro first half of 2010 threat report, available in full here, spam continued to grow between January and June 2010, with a brief lull during April.
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. The top URLs blocked by Trend Micro were adult websites, as well as sites that hosted malicious variants such as IFRAME code, TROJ_AGENT, and JS_DLOADR.ATF.
"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 commented Amit Nath Country Manager India and SAARC Trend Micro", he further adds "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."
