Politics and religion gain popularity in spam

China & US responsible for more than half of all of the world?s spam

The President of US Barack Obama was not only a favourite contestant for several people across the globe, but also among cyber criminals.

The most popular personality over the past three months (third quarter of 2012) has been Barack Obama, President of the United States, said a survey by Kaspersky Lab.

“His name was mentioned in emails on a wide variety of subjects: from your typical ads for “watches just like the president’s” right up to denouncing the president’s administration urging US citizens to challenge the current president’s politics (as a rule, these types of emails also contained requests for donations for funding). Fraudulent and malicious emails using the US president’s name were also detected,” said the note from the security firm.

The scammers also used President Obama’s popularity for their own purposes. Not only did fraudulent emails use his name — they also used the name of his wife, Michelle Obama, said Kaspersky. By sending emails allegedly from the First Lady, Nigerian scammers attempted to gain recipients’ trust: the emails claiming to be from Michelle Obama promised millions of dollars to anyone who would send “her” their addresses, telephone numbers, and $240.

In addition to politics, religion was another common spam theme in Q3 2012. It was spam that spread the link to the YouTube video with the scandalously controversial movie “The Innocence of Muslims”. “Malicious users will typically exploit interest in hot topics by adding links to malicious resources in these types of emails. However, in this case, the links in the emails led directly to the YouTube video, and no malicious programs were spread through this spam mailing,” said the report from Kaspersky.

Some malicious users managed to use the controversy surrounding the film to their own advantage by sending malicious emails tempting users with links allegedly leading to the latest news. The links in these emails took recipients to a hacked website that then redirected them to a malicious resource, pillsearnings.nl. This was the same destination used in the mailing that used the US president’s name and addressed the elections.

Sources of spam by country and region

In Q3 2012, the percentage of spam emails sent from China and the US increased considerably (+6.7 and +15 percentage points respectively). In total, these two countries are responsible for more than half of all of the world’s spam.

Spam originating in China was sent primarily to the Asia-Pacific region, Australia, and Western Europe, while spam originating in the US was actively sent to the American continent, the Asia-Pacific region, and Australia. As far as Eastern Europe is concerned, the largest amount of spam came from India and Vietnam. India’s spam primarily targeted Western Europe, where the country took second place in the Top 10 sources of spam.

As for the regions where spam originates, because of the US, the region of North America rose significantly ( up 15 percentage points), while Asia’s percentage remained high, with nearly one-half of spam being sent from computers in that region. Western Europe pushed past Eastern Europe and took fourth place, approaching South America’s numbers).