Spam rise global

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By country, the amount of worldwide spam originating from the United States has dropped steadily over the past three quarters, but the U.S. still leads in spam production at 25.5 percent of the global market. Brazil, Turkey, India, and Poland have also seen sizable increases at producing spam. According to McAfee's second-quarter Threats Report, spam and malware levels in the second quarter of this year, shot up 80 percent compared with the first quarter:



Some of the reasons for this global rise in spam: More home users are setting up their PCs as remote access machines and as Web hosts, leaving those PCs increasingly vulnerable. Another major threat reported by McAfee is AutoRun malware, which is triggered automatically when a person plugs in a USB stick, memory card, or other external device. The Trojans PWS-OnlineGames and PWS-Gamania and two viruses named W32/Sality and W32/Virut have propagated through removable cards and drives.

The openness of social networking sites often puts them at risk. On Facebook, people freely access different applications that require a username and password, so those apps can easily tap into their accounts. McAfee also saw an increase this past quarter in the "popular" Facebook malware Koobface. Then there is Twitter spam. In April, the site was hit by a JavaScript worm that exploited a hole to infect user profiles. The same month, a French hacker was able to gain access to the account of a Twitter product director.
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