The quantity of email spam has dropped in the second quarter ended June 30, 2012. This, internet security experts feel, is because the spammers and hackers are on seasonal holiday.

“The amount of spam is falling. Many spam bot computers (the computers that spread their network like wildfire by making the victim PCs their slaves) are turned off while their owners are on a holiday,” security firm Kaspersky has said in its quality analysis of spam.

It forecast that economic (spam is affected by the adverse impact of economic crisis) and competitive (some advertisers are abandoning spammers to become clients of coupon services).

“We forecast a further fall in the share of spam even after the holiday season as the economic situation becomes tougher. We expect a gradual decline in the proportion of spam, which could drop to the 65 per cent mark of total mail traffic within the next year,” it said.

“In the second quarter, the share of spam in mail traffic was down by 2.3 percentage points compared to the previous quarter, averaging 74.3 p.c.,” it said in its latest report.

Asia with a share of 53 per cent and Latin America with 14 per cent remain the most prominent sources of spam. The proportion of emails with malicious attachments decreased by 0.3 percentage points compared to the first quarter and averaged 3 per cent.

Prominent target

In April, Kaspersky detected spam that imitated an official Facebook notification. However, this time the links in the emails didn’t take users to hacked domains or sites, but to pages on Wikipedia and Amazon.

Apparently, malicious users seeded malicious script on their newly created Wikipedia pages as well as on pages made to look like advertisements for pre-owned goods on Amazon.com.

kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in

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