India among the most popular malware destinations

India features among the countries where malware spam, or anything that comes with a virus or Trojan attachment urging you to visit an infected website, is the most popular, a new report has said.

According to the McAfee Threats Report, which was simultaneously released here, Colombia, South Korea, Russia and Vietnam are the other countries in this category. Argentina had the most variety in spam, with 16 different topic areas, ranging from drugs to lonely women to diplomas. Italy came in with the least variety, with just six types of spam, it said.

The report uncovered that malware has reached its highest levels, making the first six months of 2010 the most active half-year ever for total malware production. At the same time, spam levelled out with only 2.5 per cent growth from Q1 2010.

Malware continued to soar in Q2 2010, as there were 10 million new pieces catalogued in the first half of this year. Consistent with last quarter, threats on portable storage devices took the lead for the most popular malware, followed by fake anti-virus software and social media specific malware.

With approximately 55,000 new pieces of malware that appear everyday, globally AutoRun malware and password-stealing Trojans round out the Top Two malware threats, the report said. After reaching its highest point in Q3 2009, with nearly 175 billion messages per day spam rates have hit a plateau.

Cyber criminals took advantage of anticipation on and hype of the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, and used various methods to promote scams and search-engine 'poisoning'. Globally, the most popular types of spam varied from country to country with some interesting findings.

For instance, delivery status notifications, or non-delivery receipt spam, were the most popular in United States, Italy, Spain, China, Great Britain, Brazil, Germany and Australia. Malware spam, or anything that comes with a virus or Trojan attachment urging you to visit an infected website, was the most popular in Colombia, India, South Korea, Russia and Vietnam.

"Our latest threat report depicts that malware has been on a steady incline in the first half of 2010," said Mike Gallagher, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Global Threat Intelligence for McAfee. "It's also obvious that cyber criminals are becoming more in tune with what the general public is passionate about from a technology perspective and using it to lure unsuspecting victims", he added.