Spain, Spanish State (Press Release) October 30, 2008 — Less than six percent of emails that reached companies in the third quarter of 2008 were legitimate correspondence. Moreover, 1.43 percent of emails contained malware. The most frequently detected strains of malware during this quarter included Netsky.P, and the SpamtaLoad.DO and SpamtaLoad.CZ Trojans.

“The percentage of infected emails increased significantly in September, to more than double the levels that we had witnessed in previous months. This could be related with the financial crisis, as cyber-crooks step up attacks to enhance their chances of success and avoid the effects of the economic recession”, explains Luis Corrons.

The rest of the emails received, 91.77 percent, were spam. The amount of junk mail in circulation peaked in August, when more than 93 percent of mail traffic analyzed by Panda Security was cataloged as spam.

This data has been extracted from a sample of more than 123 million emails analyzed by TrustLayer Mail (http://www.pandasecurity.com/enterprise/solutions/trustlayer/), the anti-spam managed service from Panda Security.

Much of this illicit traffic was sent from computers infected with bots, a type of malicious code that allows cyber-crooks to take remote control of compromised systems. These infected computers are normally networked to form ‘botnets’ and used for malicious ends including sending spam. These computers are known colloquially as ‘zombies’. Over the last three months, 330,000 new zombies were activated every day.

Top spam topics of the quarter included sexual enhancers (23%), pharmaceuticals (19%) and loans (12%).

Subject Percentage
Sexual enhancers 23%
Pharmaceuticals 19%
Loans 12%
Replicas 10%
Pornography 8%
Other 18%