Spam News

Study says spam targets auto industry the most

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Spam email continues to be a security threat to businesses, but not all business sectors are targeted equally, according to a new study by a web security firm. The automotive industry receives a higher percentage of spam than any other sector.

According to the study from Panda Security, 99.89 percent of all email received by businesses in the auto industry was spam. The next most-spammed sectors were electronics and government.

"We were curious to see if spam and email-borne malware affected all companies equally, or whether there were factors that influenced the likelihood of them being targeted," said Luis Corrons, technical director at Panda Labs. "We were surprised to find significant differences - up to 12 percent – in the ratio of junk mail received between different business sectors."

Despite what appears to be a bigger emphasis on certain sectors, the make-up of spam did not differ much across sectors. The majority of spam messages, more than 68 percent, was pharmaceutical spam, Panda said.

Spam can lead to infections of PCs if users open malicious attachments or visit links in spam to websites hosting malware. Panda said 70 percent of all malware detections come from banking Trojans that attempt to steal user bank account credentials.