The spammers and malware authors profited of the holiday time when a lot of people are at home and sent a large amount of emails just before the official free days. As can be seen in the graphic below, we registered a higher activity in the two days before the holidays and immediately after them. The red bars are either weekend days or holidays (25.12 and 1.1).
What kind of spam was sent?
A lot of meds spam, fake products and a lot of malware carried as attachment in different forms:
- Pictures or news about Angelina Jolie
- News about Barack Obama
- Outlook Web Access password reset
- Post packet tracking
- Greeting cards
- Flash Exploits
- others
Conclusions
Sadly, we see that a lot of spam was sent during business hours. This means that there are a lot of computers in companies which are infected and are part of a botnet. Even if we see that a lot more spam was sent in the evening, this actually represents the peak hours in the USA (23h in Germany is 17h on the Est coast and 14h on West coast). Of course, we cannot say that all the spam is originating from USA, but many reports have shown that it is the biggest source of sending spam and hosting malicious files and websites.
