Sex, dating and xmas spam traffic

Sex and dating made up a whopping 82.6% of all spam traffic during December, according to Symantec's latest intelligence report.

The security firm says the category dominated the global spam traffic, which is common, but concerns should be raised at how the large the margin is.

While it appears scammers think internet users were a lonely bunch of people over the holiday period, pharmaceutical spam also featured strongly, coming second during the findings.

The banking industry was once again the most targeted industry for phishing, collecting 65% of all attacks for the month.

Finally, over 80% of all adware last month was flagged by generic detections which may not sound all that exciting, but once again, rarely is the percentage so high.

Symantec says this generally indicates that adware creators aren’t attempting anything new or unique, perhaps having taken a break over the holiday season.

Largest spam sources

For the month of December, the U.S. claimed the dubious honour of being the largest source of spam at 12.7%, phishing scams at 24.2%, and virus attachments at 40.9% globally.

While the company so it’s not unusual for the U.S. to top one or two of these three categories, claiming the triple crown of risk-based distribution is a little less common.

In other country news, New Zealand’s virus rate remained at about half the global average while Norway jumped up to become the most targeted country for phishing attacks, with 1 in 81.4 emails in the country phishing attempts during December.

Norway also came in second as the biggest source country, distributing 20.2% of all worldwide phishing attacks.

The reasons why one country would jump like this are often varied according to Symantec, but likely due to a concerted phishing campaign by attackers.

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