The amount of spam detected in mail traffic in the first quarter averaged 78.6 percent, up by 1.4 percentage points compared with the previous quarter, though still 6.5 percentage points less than the corresponding figure for last year, according to a report by Russian antivirus maker Kaspersky Lab. In the first quarter, the Asian and Latin American share of the total volume of spam worldwide grew by 2.93 and 3.85 percentage points, respectively. The amount of spam originating from eastern and western Europe fell by 5.64 and 2.36 percentage points, respectively. Africa joined the list of the most active spam senders, the volume of unsolicited messages coming from African countries accounting for 3.66 percent of the worldwide spam total, exceeding that of the US and Canada. These figures are in line with Kaspersky Lab's forecasts that botnets would start shifting to regions with less effective or non-existent anti-spam legislation. However, cybercriminal activity suggests that in future botnets will also be developed in better protected regions meaning they will be spread relatively evenly across the globe, much as they are now. Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen maintained its leading position in the Top 10 rating of malicious programs distributed via mail traffic in this year's first quarter. The most notable entries in the Top 10 malicious program to spread via email belonged to a mail worm family and accounted for four of the rating's ten entries. In the first quarter, the volume of phishing emails was very small and accounted for only 0.03 percent of all mail traffic. PayPal and eBay remained in the unenviable position of being the organizations most frequently targeted by phishers. They were followed by Habbo, Facebook and HSBC. The report further indicates that, in the first quarter, Google services such as Google AdWords and Google Checkout were attacked much less often. The phishers switched their attentions to Brazilian social network Orkut, owned by Google. The attacks on this social network reached 1.96 percent of the total, putting it in 12th place in the list of organizations most often targeted by phishers.
