AppRiver filters catch 3.5 billion spam emails in August, US largest point of origin

AppRiver, an email and web security solutions provider, has released its Global Threatscape Report for the month of September, documenting the amount of spam traffic caught by the company’s email filters in August of this year. While the report does provide information about specific malware threats – like the fact that X.UPX.App.pakuberc was the most common malware threat in August based on frequency of appearance in email traffic – it also offered valuable information about the fluctuation of spam frequency and its countries of origin.

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The United States took the cake as the country from which the most amount of spam originated, with a whopping 418,874,417 pieces of spam coming from here in the month of August. August also marked the first time that Germany and Mexico were seen in the top 10 countries of origin for spam, accounting for 104,145,829 and 96,151,887 articles of spam, respectively. The other countries that made it into the top ten included Columbia, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Belarus, India, and Taiwan.

The surge in spam in the United States pushed North America’s spam and malicious email traffic to account for over 25 percent (25.5 percent, to be exact) of what was caught by AppRiver’s filters. It still didn’t take the number one spot, however, with Europe being awarded that dubious honor and accounting for 31.7 percent of malicious email traffic last month. Asia also finished in front of North America, albeit by a hair, with 25.7 percent of tracked spam coming from the continent.

On the whole, spam traffic was also on the rise, with AppRiver’s filters quarantining just shy of 3.5 billion spam messages in August. The number marks the highest amount of spam that the company has seen since back in early 2011. The malicious traffic was, for the most part, sustained as well; with the exception of a couple of days around the middle of the month, traffic was always above 75 million articles of spam emails per day.

In fact, AppRiver’s numbers appeared to indicate that malware creators were busy over the course of the month. The company’s filter’s monitored malware in email attachments in August, and the results showed that campaigns spiked throughout the month, with a new one spiking activity levels roughly every week or so before dipping back down.