BANGALORE, INDIA: According to Symantec's Phishing Report for November 2009, there was a 17 per cent increase in all phishing attacks from the previous month. The holiday season can be a golden period for phishers and spammers to launch new attacks via emails, social networking sites and online forums, and individuals should be wary and cautious about suspicious and unknown links.

In October 2009, it seems that EMEA’s position as the highest region of spam origination has been threatened by the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region and South America. APJ and South America have now passed North America with 23 percent, and 22 percent respectively of all spam originating from these regions.

This sizeable increase in spam appearing from South America and the APJ region is significant, but not altogether surprising when you consider the massive growth of Internet connections in these regions during the past few years. In October 2009, spam levels hit a maximum of 93 percent, and averaged at 87 percent of all email messages. India contributed significantly to the rise of APJ.

When the country ranking for origin of spam for June 2009 is compared with October 2009, it can be seen that countries such as India, Taiwan, Thailand and Chile have increased several places.

In October 2009, an average of 1.9 percent of all spam messages contained malware. This equates to a 0.6 percent increase from September 2009 when the number of messages containing malware hit a maximum of 4.5 percent of all spam.  One of the more interesting spam emails that had malware attached to it was masquerading as a notification from a social networking site that the recipient’s password has been reset. The message contained an attached zip file containing a malicious exe file.