One in every 918 emails in Singapore contains a virus

The country’s ratio of spam in email traffic also declined to 73.4%.

Symantec Corp. announced the results of the August 2011 Symantec Intelligence Report, now combining the best research and analysis from the Symantec.cloud MessageLabs Intelligence Report and the Symantec State of Spam & Phishing Report. This month’s analysis reveals that once more spammers are seeking to benefit from fluctuations in the turbulent financial markets, most notably by sending large volumes of spam relating to certain “pink sheets” stocks in an attempt to “pump” the value of these stocks before “dumping” them at a profit.

In a pump-and-dump stock scam, spammers promote certain stocks in order to inflate the price as much as possible so that they may then be sold before their valuation crashes back to reality. The spam for these scams tries to convince the prospective mark that the penny stock is actually worth more than its valuation, or that it will soon skyrocket. Most of these claims are either misleading or false.

A successful pump-and-dump spam campaign will artificially drive up the price of the stock to a point where the scammers decide to sell their shares. This usually coincides with them ending the spam campaign, which in turn reduces the interest in the stock, helping to drive its valuation back to the original low price.

“Scammers can make substantial profits in a matter of days with a well-executed pump-and-dump spam. In the current turbulent environment many people may be convinced to invest in stocks that the scammers claim will benefit from the market turbulence,” said Paul Wood, senior intelligence analyst, Symantec.cloud.

Further analysis also revealed that there were as many new boot time malware, also known as master boot record threats, in the first seven months of 2011 as there were in the previous three years. An MBR is an area of the hard disk used by a computer to perform start up operations. It is one of the first things to be read and executed by the computer hardware when a computer is powered on, even before the operating system itself.

Other key global and Singapore statistics include:

· Global ratio of spam in email traffic declined to 75.9 percent (1 in 1.32 emails) with Singapore seeing a similar trend where the ratio of spam in email traffic declined from 75.7 percent to 73.4 percent.

· The global ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic was one in 203.3 emails (0.49 percent) in August. Singapore fared slightly better as the ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic dropped to one in 918.0 emails as compared to one in 761.8 in July 2011.

· Symantec Intelligence identified an average of 3,441 Web sites each day harbouring malware and other potentially unwanted programs including spyware and adware; a decrease of 49.4 percent since July 2011.