UK under spam attack

UK second only to US in number of malicious mailshots last year, according to Kaspersky Lab

The UK is the second most-targeted nation for malicious email attacks, according to the latest report from security vendor Kaspersky Lab.

The report, into spammer activity in 2014, found that users in the UK suffered the second-highest proportion of email attacks, with a 9.6 per cent share of the global total.

This was second only to the US, which had a 9.8 per cent share of attacks, with Germany rounding out the top three on 9.2 per cent. The report also found that the US was the largest source of spam with 16.7 per cent.

According to Kaspersky, mobile spam is on the increase, with the use of messages that replicate emails sent from mobile devices that may contain links to malicious attachments. Mobile apps such as WhatsApp and Viber are also used to generate "spam mass mailings".

Maria Vergelis, spam analyst at Kaspersky Lab, said: "Fake bank notifications are among the most common types of malicious spam or phishing attacks. Recently, we have seen noticeable changes in the structure of some phishing email.

"In 2014, spammers began to complicate the design of fake messages by adding more links to official resources and services of the organisations from which they claim to be sending their bogus notifications," she said.

For the fourth consecutive year, the report found programmes that are targeted to steal financial data were the most common malware sent by email.

But the proportion of spam in emails dropped from 2013 by 2.8 percentage points to 66.8 per cent in 2014. The drop was due to the "advertising of legal goods and services migrating to more effective legal platforms", according to Kaspersky.