May 25, 2015
New domain extensions launched early this year have already been quite popular with spammers.
According to Kaspersky Lab’s Q1 2015 analysis, some of the new domains "represent an excellent tool for promoting unwanted or illegitimate advertising campaigns."
Kapersky says much of the spam was related to the extension involved - for example, household maintenance, construction or equipment installation spam was sent via .work domains.
Insurance was another biggie.
"When looking at Q1 in general and the type of spam on the new domains, insurance was one of the hottest topics in terms of the number of messages and the number of changing domains in mass mailings," said Tatyana Shcherbakova, Senior Spam Analyst at Kaspersky Lab.
Kapersky expects further growth in the number of new top-level domains used in mass mailings.
With spam associated with the new domain extensions being quite heavy, it could potentially pose a risk to the credibility of these names given they are new entrants.
On the bright side, the proportion of spam in email traffic overall was 59.2% globally during the first quarter, 6 percentage points lower than in the previous quarter. Kapersky says the share of spam gradually decreased this year, with the highest level sent in January (61.68%) and the lowest during March (56.17%).
While many people may think the bulk of the world's spam comes from elsewhere, the USA remains the biggest source of spam; sending 14.5% of all unwanted mail. Russia came next at 7.27%. Ukraine followed with 5.56% of the world’s spam. The leaderboard from there was Vietnam (4.82%), China (4.51%) and Germany (4.39%). Rounding out the Top 10 was India with 2.83% of all spam distributed worldwide.
While Australia appears nowhere in the top 20 for sending spam, it is in the top 10 of targets for phishing emails - communications that attempt trick people into giving out their personal and banking information. 11.18% of Australian Internet users were recipients of phishing emails during the first quarter of this year.
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