UK most popular phishing target

1 in 253 emails seeks to steal information

The UK is the most popular country to target with phishing attacks, according a recent report.

MessageLabs delivered the news Friday in its monthly intelligence report on spam and malware.

The report found that this month 1 out of every 253.6 emails was connected to a phishing operation. The global average is 1 phishing attempts in every 562.3 emails.

Overall, the company reported that spam in the UK was down slightly to a rate of 90 per cent. Similar drops were found in the US, Canada and Denmark. Danes remained the most spam-ridden population, however, with 94 per cent of the country's email coming in the form of junk mail.

The company said that botnets were responsible for the vast majority of the January spam load. Researchers found that 83.4 per cent of all spam originated from botnet-controlled systems. Much of the remaining spam load was from webmail services, which MessageLabs said is still popular amongst spammers despite new security measures from the service providers.

Among the more interesting stories in the report was the rise and fall of the Lethic botnet. First surfacing in December, Lethic accounted for just over 5 per cent of all spam activity in the first week of January and then mysteriously vanished.

Paul Wood, a senior analyst for MessageLabs parent company Symantec, suggested that the disappearance of Lethic may have come at the benefit of another botnet.

"Lethic seems to have disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived," he said.

"The Bagle botnet was sending the exact same spam with the same hyperlinks as Lethic and over the same time period leading us to believe that Lethic possibly came from the same creators as Bagle or the people behind the spam may have hired the resources of more than one botnet gang to increase output."