Malicious spam skyrockets

Its official.  The level of malicious spam has grown to unprecedented levels.  We keep a close eye on different spam categories, and the last six weeks has seen malicious spam grow and grow.  This week, it overtook health and product related spam as the number one category.  As you can see in our statistics from last week, malicious spam constituted nearly one in three spam messages:

As we have reported in this blog, all the major spamming botnets have been in on the act, in particular Rustock, which has managed to grow its spamming capacity as a result.  This chart measures the proportion of spam sent by each botnet:

Today, there are numerous malicious spam campaigns occuring.  What follows are just a few examples:

From Rustock, the CNN campaign we reported this week continues:

From the Mega-D botnet:

 From the Srizbi botnet:

From the Grum botnet:

And lastly, Storm has come full circle and reverted back to a e-card theme we saw 12 months ago:

All this is concerning to say the least.  With so much malicious spam about, the chances of more people falling for the ruse and unwittingly furthering the purposes of the criminals is that much higher.   Be particularly wary out there.