Kaspersky Lab researcher Maria Namestnikova attributed the decline to the shutdown of a new version of the Hlux/Kelihos botnet. Last month, Kaspersky Lab partnered with firm CrowdStrike, Dell SecureWorks and the HoneyNet Project to take down the new version called Kelihos.B.
In addition, the spam report found the share of phishing emails fell by half compared with February’s figure, accounting for 0.01% of all mail traffic. Financial organizations are the most attractive target for the phishers: almost a quarter of anti-phishing detections came from phishing sites designed to steal from bank and e-pay accounts.
Malware was found in 2.8% of all emails in March, the same as in the previous month.
The top 20 most popular sources of spam remained largely unchanged from the previous month: the first six places were occupied by the same countries, though Vietnam and South Korea swapped places, coming fourth and fifth, respectively, the report found.
The shares of the other countries in the rating did not change significantly, with all fluctuations within a range of 1.5 percentage points. India maintained its lead with 12.3% of all distributed spam.
For the third month in a row the US topped the rating of email anti-virus detections: the share of Kaspersky detections increased by 1.7 percentage points in the US compared to February and accounted for 14.7% of the overall total.
Australia came in second with 12.4% of all email anti-virus detections having doubled its February’s result. As in February, Hong Kong was in third place.