Despite a spike in January, spam levels are still slowly decreasing year over year. As expected, the small increase that began during the second quarter has ended and the trend continues downward.
Infections from messaging botnets have showed an overall decline since May. In September, the number returned to the level of the fourth quarter 2011. From July to September this year, not only did Grum disappear, but Festi and Cutwail infections were sharply down as well.
In our databases, these URLs and domains are classified according to their risk ratings:
Similar to last quarter, we recorded an average of 2.7 million new suspect URLs per month. This quarter, we analyzed more than 500,000 domains, compared with 300,000 in previous months.
Many of these suspicious URLs (90.9 percent) host malware, exploits, or codes that have been designed specifically to compromise computers. Phishing and spam represent 3.5 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively.