May witnessed an all-time low for virus-laden e-mails and a record high for spam, according to figures released by security services firm Blackspider Technologies.
The number of e-mails containing a malicious program made up fewer than 1% of all e-mails seen by Blackspider, while junk e-mails represented 87.74%.
The company said that the record-breaking spam figure was boosted by a spike in traffic between 21 and 23 May, when businesses were flooded with advertising e-mails.
The surge came from a botnet made up of more than 150,000 compromised PCs and peaked on 22 May.
James Kay, chief technology officer at Blackspider, pointed to the spam attacks on Blue Security as a warning not to be complacent. “Spam is still a potent threat despite it being relatively old news,” he said.
“First we saw what happened to Blue Security, then just a week later we saw a spam spike which could be crippling for anti-spam service providers and anti-spam products.”
Kay said that, even though the number of e-mails carrying viruses was just 0.73%, the number of compromised machines used as spambots showed that virus infection is still a widespread problem.
Netsky.P continued to top the malware chart, followed by Trojan-Spy.HTML.Bankfraud.od in second place and Download.Trojan in third place.
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