MessageLabs: Hong Kong regains the top spam spot

Spam levels in Hong Kong experienced the largest increase and rose by 13.2 percent in September to reclaim its place as the most spammed location with levels reaching 79.6 percent of all emails, said MessageLabs Monday.

Releasing the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for September 2008, MessageLabs said in a statement that current findings echo earlier results in April and May when Hong Kong was again the most spammed country. The following table illustrates the position and percent of all emails being spammed in Hong Kong.

"Hong Kong usually sits in the top three of the most spammed countries," said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst of MessageLabs. "Hong Kong is an international financial and commercial hub of global importance, with a high proportion of western and other foreign businesses. As a result of this, the internet-borne security threats confronting organizations based in Hong Kong increasingly mirror those faced across the globe, in terms of both scale and nature."

Though Hong Kong spam rate dropped in August, local-language spam accounted for 7 percent of spam subjects heading specifically for Hong Kong, Sunner added

Also in September, analysis of MessageLabs URL Filtering service shows an increasing number of businesses are blocking employee access to inappropriate web sites, such as porn, during the working day - 85 percent of adult and explicit category web blocks were recorded. Most policy rules are set by organizations to block this content between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. Further analysis reveals that 28.9 percent of blocks occur between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., which is usually lunchtime for most employees.

"Adult and sexually explicit web content accounted for 1.7 percent of all web-based content blocked in September," said Sunner. "This is a sign that organizations have caught on to the dangers of the web and are doing their part to deploy services that will protect their business from web threats while also maintaining employee productivity and maintaining acceptable use policies."

Other report highlights:

Web security: Analysis of Web security activity shows that 45.9 percent of all web-based malware intercepted was new in September. MessageLabs also identified an average of 3,660 new websites per day harboring malware and other potentially unwanted programs such as spyware and adware, an increase of 22.8 percent since August.

Spam: In September 2008, the global ratio of spam in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was 70.1 percent (1 in 1.43 emails), a decrease of 8.1 percent on the previous month.

Viruses: The global ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources was 1 in 131.7 emails (.76 percent) in September, a decrease of .4 percent since August. In September, 6.3 percent of email-borne malware contained links to malicious sites, a decline of 11.3 percent since August.

Phishing: September saw an increase of .16 percent in the proportion of phishing attacks compared with the previous month. One in 288.1 (0.35 percent) emails comprised some form of phishing attack. When judged as a proportion of all email-borne threats such as viruses and Trojans, the number of phishing emails has decreased by 29 percent to 45.7 percent of all email-borne malware threats intercepted in September.