South Africa is still the most targeted country in terms of phishing e-mails with one in 32.5 e-mails being blocked as phishing attacks.
This was revealed by the February edition of Symantec's 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report, which states most e-mail-borne malware is transferred by malicious hyperlinks.
The report says spam accounted for the bulk of the country's e-mail traffic. “Overall, in February 2011, the global ratio of spam in e-mail traffic increased by 2.7% and now counts for 81%.”
The public sector held its position as the most targeted industry with 41.1 e-mails being blocked as malicious, it says.
According to Symantec, since the end of January, MessageLabs Intelligence has identified significant volumes of integrated attacks that make use of well-timed and carefully crafted targeted techniques.
By the beginning of February, the attacks increased in number and these malware families were aggressively used to conduct simultaneous attacks via propagation techniques, signalling the likelihood of a common origin for these infected e-mails, the security vendor says.
Jason Ellis, vice-president of EMEA Channels at Symantec, says since MessageLabs Intelligence began tracking targeted attacks, it appears that the overall percentage of targeted malware in circulation with office-based file formats, such as spreadsheets and documents, has diminished.
“This is perhaps a result of the increased popularity of other file formats as they become easier to use. What is more intriguing, however, is that malicious executable files, such as .exe [files] have also increased in frequency, in addition to the most popular file format, PDFs.”
Attackers are beginning to target users with PDFs that conceal malicious content. Many people still consider PDFs a relatively trusted file type, the report says.
However, PDFs are potentially one of the most dangerous formats available, as it is significantly easier to generate legitimate and concealed malicious content with PDFs than it is to do so with other file formats, Symantec says.
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