E-mail-borne threats decreased in last quarter – Symantec

The global ratio of electronic mail (email)-borne viruses in email traffic decreased by 0.03 per cent as at the last quarter of just ended last year.

This also accounted for one in every 255.8 emails, which is 0.39 per cent in November, a decrease of 0.03 percentage points since October 2011.

Symantec Intelligence Report for the October 30, 2011 made available to ITRealms Online, showed that further analysis has 40.2 per cent of email-borne malware containing links to malicious Web sites, an increase of 20.1 percentage points since October 2011.

Even as the new integrated report provides the latest analysis of cyber security threats, trends and insights from the Symantec Intelligence team concerning malware, spam, and other potentially harmful business risks. The data used to compile the analysis for this combined report includes data from September and October 2011.

According to the report, the e-mail-borne threats remained at the top of the table in the United Kingdom (UK) with the highest ratio of malicious emails in November, with one in 149.4 emails identified as malicious.

Switzerland, the report indicated, has the second highest rate, with one in 185.6 emails identified as malicious. Just as the South Africa returned to the top-five list this month with one in 222.5 emails blocked as malicious.

Equally, the virus levels for email-borne malware in the United States (US) reached one in 360.1 and one in 219.9 in Canada. While in Germany virus activity reached one in 275.0, one in 710.5 in Denmark and in The Netherlands one in 238.2.

Australia has one in 326.2 emails having malicious threat and one in 325.8 in Hong Kong, whereas Japan’s rate was one in 1,147, compared with one in 450.0 in Singapore, even as in Brazil, one in 570.6 emails contained malicious content.

On the web-based malware threats in November, Symantec Intelligence identified an average of 4,915 web sites each day harbouring malware and other potentially unwanted programmes including spyware and adware; which saw an increase of 47.8 per cent since October 2011.

The endpoint threats, the report showed are the most frequently blocked malware for the last month, with precise threat coming from WS.Trojan.H1.

“WS.Trojan.H is generic cloud-based heuristic detection for files that possess characteristics of an as yet unclassified threat. Files detected by this heuristic are deemed by Symantec to pose a risk to users and are therefore blocked from accessing the computer,” part of the report read.

Also, the report showed that geographical trends emphasized that spam in the United States records about 69.9 per cent of email were spam and 69.5 per cent in Canada.

The spam level in the UK, ITRealms Online gathered was 69.5 per cent within the report under review, while in the Netherlands, spam accounted for 70.5 per cent of email traffic, 70.1 per cent in Germany, 70.4 per cent in Denmark.

In Australia, it recorded 68.6 per cent of email were blocked as spam, 69.2 per cent in Hong Kong and 68.0 per cent in Singapore, compared with 66.6 percent in Japan, even as spam accounted for 70.1 per cent of email traffic in South Africa and 74.3 per cent in Brazil.

Remmy Nweke

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