TY - GEN
T1 - Malware in spam email
T2 - Risks and trends in the Australian Spam Intelligence Database
AU - Broadhurst, Roderic
AU - Trivedi, Harshit
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
©Australian Institute of Criminology 2020.
PY - 2020/9/22
Y1 - 2020/9/22
N2 - A 10 percent sample of a 2016 dataset of 25.76 million spam emails provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority's Spam Intelligence Database was scanned for malware using the VirusTotal Malware database. Nearly one in 10 (9.9% or 255,222) emails were identified as malware compromised and, similarly, 9.9 percent were identified as inactive. Of the compromised URL sites, nearly one-third (31.8% or 81,176) could be further classified as phishing (58.4%) or trojan-compromised URLs (40.6%) or dedicated malicious websites (1%). All 115,025 unique file attachments found in the entire sample (0.5% of all spam) were also scanned and 31.4 percent (36,405) were compromised with various forms of malware. The majority of compromised attachments were found in images (55.6%), followed by PDFs (15.0%) and binary files (10.0%). Various trojans and ransomware were the most common malware, and these and others identified in the sample are described.
AB - A 10 percent sample of a 2016 dataset of 25.76 million spam emails provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority's Spam Intelligence Database was scanned for malware using the VirusTotal Malware database. Nearly one in 10 (9.9% or 255,222) emails were identified as malware compromised and, similarly, 9.9 percent were identified as inactive. Of the compromised URL sites, nearly one-third (31.8% or 81,176) could be further classified as phishing (58.4%) or trojan-compromised URLs (40.6%) or dedicated malicious websites (1%). All 115,025 unique file attachments found in the entire sample (0.5% of all spam) were also scanned and 31.4 percent (36,405) were compromised with various forms of malware. The majority of compromised attachments were found in images (55.6%), followed by PDFs (15.0%) and binary files (10.0%). Various trojans and ransomware were the most common malware, and these and others identified in the sample are described.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092788810&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - General Article
AN - SCOPUS:85092788810
SN - 0817-8542
JO - Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice
JF - Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice
ER -