Commtouch has released January Virus and Spam Statistics for 2006. Commtouch has found 19 new email-born virus attacks.


Commtouch has released January Virus and Spam Statistics for 2006. Commtouch has found 19 new email-born virus attacks.

Out of the 19, 8(42%) were graded “low intensity”, 7(37%) were graded “medium intensity” and 4(21%) were graded “massive attacks”.

According to Commtouch, a traditional anti-virus vendor to release an updated signature blocking a new virus. 40% of attacks during January peaked within 8 hours.

The average distribution time for low intensity attacks is 27 hours, medium intensity attacks took an average of 17 hours and massive attacks took 5.5 hours to spread through emails.

Amir Lev, President and CTO of Commtech, said: “Without a reliable solution for early hour protection that complements the old fashion anti-virus solutions, users are unprotected from the most massive attacks.” [Source]

Other key findings on Anti-Virus software included:

“¢ On average, each Anti-Virus completely missed 6.2 viruses (the attack was completed, and a signature was not yet available).
“¢ The average response time to new viruses among all Anti-Virus engines was 8.12 hours.

The report also revealed that 43.1% of global spam is sent from US-based sources. 12.89% of the spam is sent from China. Korean and German sources distribute around 4% of global spam.

The report revealed that the Hotmail domain was the most used to send spam, with 4.7 million messages sent in January.

Yahoo was second in the list with 4.2 million, followed by MSN with 2.1 million, Cisco with 1.9 million and Gmail with 1.5 million.

52.46% of spam sent were under the category of Pharmaceutical items, with medical offering being the top product/subject. 14.08% were under Gifts, with Rolex replicas being the top product. Enhancers and Diets (13.38%) followed in the list, followed by Finance(7.57%).

For more information on the report, click here.

 

 

 

 

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