SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Industry and
government efforts have dealt a significant blow to spam,
Commtouch® (Nasdaq: CTCH) reported today in its April
2012 Internet Threats Trend Report. The report is compiled based on
a comprehensive analysis of more than 10 billion transactions
handled by Commtouch's GlobalView™ Cloud on a daily
basis.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20110906/478788)
This time last year, spam levels were around the 150 billion
mark daily, just before the takedown of the Rustock botnet.
Spam levels dropped immediately after that takedown and have
continued to decrease ever since. In the first quarter of 2012, an
average of 94 billion spam emails were sent per day.
"The sustained decrease in spam over the last year can be
attributed to many factors, including: botnet takedowns, increased
prosecution of spammers and the source industries such as fake
pharmaceuticals and replicas," said Amir
Lev, Commtouch's chief technology officer. "However, spam is
still four times the level of legitimate email and cybercriminals
are increasing their revenues from other avenues, such as banking
fraud malware."
Specific social engineering campaigns of note this quarter
focused on the U.S. tax season, targeting both consumers and
members of the accounting profession. Facebook remains a popular
outlet, with a social engineering campaign featuring "an
unwatchable video."
Commtouch's GlobalView Cloud has unique threat intelligence
collection and analysis capabilities that form the basis for the
data in the report, as well as Commtouch's email security, Web
filtering and antivirus solutions. This threat intelligence is
supplemented with information from numerous Commtouch Security
Alliance partners.
Additional data from the trend report:
- Pornographic websites were the category most likely to contain
malware
- Pharmaceuticals and replicas were the most popular spam topics
in Q1
- India keeps its title as the
country with the most zombies – 19.2 % of all zombies
worldwide
- 270,000 zombies were activated daily for malicious
purposes
More details, including an infographic, and a brief presentation
summarizing the trend report, are available at:
http://www.commtouch.com/threat-report-april-2012.
NOTE: Reported global spam levels are based on Internet email
traffic as measured from unfiltered data streams, not including
internal corporate traffic. Therefore global spam levels will
differ from the quantities reaching end user inboxes, due to
several possible layers of filtering.
About Commtouch
Commtouch® (NASDAQ: CTCH) safeguards the world's leading
security companies and service providers with cloud-based Internet
security services. Real-time threat intelligence from Commtouch's
GlobalView™ Cloud powers its Web filtering, email security and
antivirus solutions, protecting thousands of organizations and
hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Information about
Commtouch can be found at http://www.commtouch.com or by writing to
info@commtouch.com.
- Blog: http://blog.commtouch.com
- Twitter: @Commtouch
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/commtouch
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/commtouch
Recurrent Pattern Detection, RPD, Zero-Hour and GlobalView are
trademarks, and Commtouch is a registered trademark of Commtouch.
U.S. Patent No. 6,330,590 is owned by Commtouch.
Commtouch Contact:
Amy Kenigsberg
US: 1-913-440-4072
Int'l: +972-9-794-1681
amyk@commtouch.com
SOURCE Commtouch