April 26, 2011 Symantec announced the publication of its April 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report. The April edition of the MessageLabs Intelligence report provides the latest threat trends for April 2011 to keep you informed regarding the ongoing fight against viruses, spam, spyware and other unwelcome content.

This month analysis reveals that targeted attacks intercepted by Symantec.cloud rose to 85 per day, the highest figure since March 2009 when the figure was 107 per day in the run-up to the G20 Summit held in London that year.

Simultaneously, in the aftermath of the Rustock botnet takedown, global spam volumes continued to fall and decreased by 6.4 percentage points since March to 72.9 percent in April. MessageLabs Intelligence also revealed that shortened URLs have become increasingly popular recently, being used to lure people to click on advertising links; a practice known as click-fraud.

The MessageLabs Intelligence report highlights

• Spam – 72.9% in April (a decrease of 6.4 percentage points since March 2011)
• Viruses – One in 168.6 emails in April contained malware (an increase of 0.11 percentage points since March 2011)
• Phishing – One in 242.2 emails comprised a phishing attack (an increase of 0.02 percentage points since March 2011)
• Malicious web sites – 2,431 web sites blocked per day (a decrease of 18.2% since March 2011)
• 33.0% of all malicious domains blocked were new in April (a decrease of 4.0 percentage points since March 2011)
• 22.5% of all web-based malware blocked was new in April (a decrease of 1.9 percentage points since March 2011)
• Targeted attacks increase in intensity: What does a recent targeted attack look like?
• Shortened URLs: Do you know what you’re clicking on?

— Download PDF-report (18 pages):

MLI_2011_04_April_FINAL_en-us.pdf (1 MB)

— Listen podcast:

Senior analyst Paul Wood discusses the key findings from the April 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report.

Podcast name:

MessageLabs Intelligence Security Report for April 2011

Podcast authors:

Paul Wood

Podcast length:

3:57 minutes

Podcast size:

5.4 MB

Podcast file:

http://downloads.messagelabs.com/podcasts/podcast_mli_april_2011.mp3