Global chemical and pharmaceutical tops spam list

Global chemical and pharmaceutical industries have pushed out the banking and financial sectors as those 'most attacked' by email threats during May, Message Labs has said.

Growth in the proportion of email spam targeted against the chemical and pharmaceutical industries jumped by 56.9 percent in April to 61.4 percent in May Message Lab's latest security threat report finds.

MessageLabs Intelligence Report May also showed that the global wholesale sector - ranked 12th this month - saw growth in spam traffic falling by nine percent to 43.6 percent. However, it couldn’t get away from being "the vertical most targeted with emails containing viruses", MessageLabs said.

The business support service sector (now ranked 15th), bore the greatest fall in viruses, down from 17.4 percent to 0.9 percent.

Education sectors around the world saw the greatest rise in virus traffic, with an increase of 0.9 percent, since April.

Global web security threats also continued to become more sophisticated as viruses, trojans and spam rapidly converge into 'bot' technology, MessageLabs said.

The security software vendor also discovered the latest bot-net techniques use a mail-merge tactic that combined lists of harvested names and email addresses with email templates – all downloaded from a control server on demand.

These were then transferred into a veritable "spam cannon" able to pump out millions of emails per hour using mass-mailing, mail-merge technology, said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer, MessageLabs.

The report also found global spam email traffic from new and unknown bad sources was 57.9 per cent, an increase of 0.6 percent on the previous month.

However, new and previously unknown viruses had a decrease of 0.3 percent since April.

The number of email phishing attacks also increased by 5.2 per cent, with these types of threats, now accounting for 20.8 percent of all malicious emails intercepted by the vendor in May.

In the report, MessageLabs said new issues such as domain kiting (or disposable domains), whereby cyber criminals acquire domains without paying for them and use them for illegal gains, has escalated to become a much more serious threat then predicted earlier.