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Ahmedabad, India. 19 April, 2011

Cyberoam, a division of Elitecore Technologies and the innovator of identity-based Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions, today announced the April 2011 Internet threats trend report, prepared in collaboration with its partner, Commtouch. The end of March saw a 400% increase in spam emails with attached malware, owing to several incidents of spammers appearing to use the credentials of UPS’s online parcel tracking service to make recipients download attached zip files which turn into executable malware.

Once executed, the functionality of the UPS malware include emailing out further copies of itself, downloading additional files, and, according to some reports, stealing banking credentials. In a separate PDF malware incident, the body of the email describes the PDF attachment as coming from “Xerox WorkCentre Pro”, a well-known copier/scanner/printer used in offices. Cyberoam detected this malicious PDF as PDF/Expl.IQ.

Says Abhilash Sonwane, Sr. VP, Product Management, Cyberoam, “We believe the current outbreak of email malware represents an advanced form of social engineering attacks – this time, malware authors are really targeting the minds of the recipients. When email users receive notifications from well-known entities like UPS and Xerox with subject lines familiar to them, they are likely to drop their guard down and become victims. Cyberoam’s Gateway Anti-Spam accurately identifies new email outbreak patterns like these in real time, preventing such spam from reaching your inbox.”

Also in the report, cyber-criminals are leveraging forum sites especially that of free online dating services using keywords like “Russian bride”, to hide phishing pages or malware. In addition, for the first time in over a year, pornographic and sexually explicit sites have been displaced by parked domains and spam sites as being the most compromised categories of sites.

A free homepage service hosted by T-Online provides a free homepage was abused in March as part of a fake antivirus scam. India regained its top spot as the No.1 worldwide host of zombies, increasing its share to 17%. Brazil, which had dropped to 8% and 3rd place in Q4 2010, returned to second place with 12%.