Spam activity on the rise this year

There was a fluctuating spam activity throughout the year, with average spam levels reaching 89.1 per cent, up by 1.4 per cent compared with 2009, according to Symantec'sMessageLabs Intelligence 2010 security report.
Spam from botnets accounted for an average of 88.2 per cent of all spam this year. The total number of botnets worldwide currently ranges between 3.5 and 5.4 million. Rustock remains the most dominant botnet, while Grum and Cutwail are the second and third largest respectively. This year, there were more than 339,600 different malware strains identified in malicious emails blocked, representing over a hundred-fold increase since 2009.
The massive increase was largely due to the growth in polymorphic malware variants, generated from toolkits that allow a new version of the code to be easily generated. Targeted attacks increased from ten per day to nearly 60 per day in 2010 and by the end of the year, MessageLabs blocked 77 targeted attacks each day.
This year, the average number of new malicious websites blocked each day rose to 3,066 versus 2,465 in 2009, an increase of 24.3 per cent.
MessageLabs identified malicious web threats on 42,926 distinct domains, most of which were compromised legitimate domains. In 2010 the annual average global spam rate was 89.1 per cent, up by 1.4 per cent from 2009.
In August, the global spam rate peaked at 92.2 per cent when the proportion of spam sent from botnets rose to 95 per cent as a new variant of the Rustock botnet was seeded and quickly put to use. In 2010, the average rate for malware contained in email traffic was 1 in 284.2 emails (0.352 per cent) almost flat compared with one in 286.4 (0.349 per cent) for 2009, the report said.
This yera, over 115.6 million emails were blocked by Skeptic, an increase of 58.1 per cent compared with 2009. There were 339.673 different malware strains identified in the malicious emails blocked. This represents over a hundred fold increase over 2009 and is mainly due to growth in polymorphic malware variants.
In 2010, the average ratio of email traffic blocked as phishing attacks was 1 in 444.5 (0.23 per cent), compared with 1 in 325.2 (0.31 per cent) in 2009, the report said, adding that around 95.1 billion phishing emails were projected to be in circulation in 2010.