Berlin, December 12, 2011 – eleven, leading German e-mail security supplier, announced today in its December 2011 E-mail Security Report that phishers are introducing more and more campaigns adapted to target individual countries and regions. The eleven research team reports a significant rise in German-language phishing e-mails that target customers of German financial institutions. This is just one aspect of an increasing regionalism that aims to deceive more users than ever before into entering their account or credit card information on phishing Web sites. In November 2011, victims included Deutsche Bank customers. In addition, eleven registered attempts to steal e-mail account data via phishing.

An overview of additional key trends:

• The Thanksgiving season, traditionally the most important time in the run-up to Christmas, saw a wave of event-oriented spam, phishing, and malware campaigns. The most spectacular of these was an e-mail that claimed to contain a voucher for Apple’s music platform iTunes. Opening the attachment infected the user’s computer with a Trojan.
• Spam is dominated by advertising for online casinos: 69.1 percent – more than two-thirds – of all spam e-mails focused on this subject in November 2011. Pharmaceutical spam was still in the single-digit percentage range at 9.4 percent, while no other subject exceeded the 3 percent threshold.
• The prevalence of casino spam e-mails is increasingly characterized by longer interruptions, with e-mails almost entirely disappearing for several days at a time and the overall volume of spam falling to about a fifth of its previous level. These phases can go on for over a week and appeared, for instance, in early November and again over the last few days of the month. The eleven research team assumes that botnet operators are revamping and expanding the infrastructures during this time.
• India is still the most prevalent source of spam, responsible for 11.6 percent of all spam e-mails in November. At 11.2 and 10.5 percent respectively, Brazil and Vietnam were also in the two-digit percentage range in November. Germany, on the other hand, came in 30th place with just 0.6 percent, the United States, long-term spam leader, came in 14th at 1.3 percent.
• In terms of sending e-mails containing malware, Germany is still at the forefront. In November 2011, Germany came in tenth place (3.2 percent) in known viruses and 11th place (2.7 percent) in virus outbreaks.
• The most prevalent sources of malware in November were China with 18.5 percent of known viruses and the US with 20.2 percent of all virus outbreaks. The volume of malware outbreaks originating in Austria was unusually large: with 6.8 percent, the country came in third place. The countries in which the most spam originates, India and Vietnam, also play a key role in sending known viruses, taking third and fourth place respectively.
• In October, the percentage of all e-mail that is spam hit the 90.3 percent mark, exceeding the 90 percent threshold for the first time since the Rustock botnet was taken down. In November, this figure remained steady at 90.2 percent.

You can find eleven’s complete E-mail Security Report in the eleven security blog at http://www.eleven-securityblog.de and on the eleven website at http://www.eleven.de/eleven-security-reports.html.

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eleven – E-mail security "Made in Germany"

eleven is a leading e-mail security provider based in Germany. Its eXpurgate technology, which is unique worldwide, offers a spam filter and e-mail categorization service that protects the user reliably from spam and phishing, detects potentially dangerous e-mail and can distinguish between individual messages and any kind of mass e-mail. eXpurgate also offers numerous virus protection options and a powerful e-mail firewall.

Over 45,000 companies of all sizes use eXpurgate to check and categorize more than a billion e-mail messages every day. Customers include Internet service providers and telecommunication carriers such as T-Online, O2, Vodafone and freenet as well as many well-known companies and public institutions, including Air Berlin, the Federal Association of German Banks, DATEV, the Free University of Berlin, Landesbank Berlin, Mazda, RTL, ThyssenKrupp and Tobit Software AG. For more information, visit our website at: http://www.eleven.de.

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Sascha Krieger
Hardenbergplatz 2
10623 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 / 52 00 56-0
E-mail: presse@eleven.de
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