In February, many of the malicious attachments in spam emails were supposedly sent by women who wanted to make new acquaintances ahead of Valentine's Day, Kaspersky reports.
The following is information from the Kaspersky Lab Press Release.
Kaspersky: Some cybercriminals went a step further, even trying to lure recipients by promising that the attached files contained revealing photos. At the same time, there were also more conventional malicious messages, which were sent in bulk and imitated fake notifications from popular social networking sites, such as Facebook.
Trojans dominated February's love-themed spam . The mass messages sent by cybercriminals targeted gullible users with a Trojan-Dropper. This Trojan installs two malicious programs on the user's system.
The first is a spyware that steals all document files (* Docx, * xlsx, * Pdf) from the computer and sends them to a specific mailbox. The second is an IRC-bot/worm, called ShitStorm can perform DDoS attacks on websites and spread copies of itself via MSN and P2P services.
If recipients respond to emails of this kind, their computer can easily become part of a botnet.
In addition to spyware Trojans, February's spam also included ransomware programs – which block the user's computer and then demand money to restore it.
The percentage of spam messages as a percentage of all emails worldwide increased by 4.2 percentage points in February compared to the previous month and reached 69.9%. This percentage is down by 1.2 percentage points compared to February 2013.
China returned to the top of the rankings as the country from which the most spam messages originated with 23% . It was followed by the US with 19.1 % and South Korea with 12.8% .
The full version of Kaspersky Lab February spam activity report is available on Securelist.com.
Source: e-pcmag.gr
