Korea joins Brazil and India as top spam spreaders

Most targeted sites were Paypal, Facebook and Santander

UK IT security specialists may have noticed that they were tracking increasing amounts of Korean spam last month as unsolicited emails originating from South Korea almost doubled in April.

This made it the third most culpable country after India and Brazil, according to the most recent Kaspersky report.

Overall the amount of spam in email traffic increased by 1.2 per cent in April month on month.

The most targeted site was Paypal, with Facebook and Santander second and third. Ebay fell from second in March to fourth in April.

There were two malicious programs noted in April, the Packed.Win32.Katusha.n and Trojan-Downloader.Win32.FraudLoad.hxv.

Both are linked to fake anti-virus programs, with the former used to inject them while the latter downloads them to users' computers.

In April, malicious files were found in 3.65 per cent of all emails, an increase of 0.43 per cent on the previous month.

The US, Russia and the UK continued to be the countries where malware was detected most frequently in mail traffic.

A special case of "spam defending" cited in the report was that of New Yorker Jeremy Clancy, who was so angry with the volume of spam in his mail box that he decided to track down his tormentors.

Within a week he had found 23 people that he suspected of distributing spam and cut the internet cables to their houses.

On the eighth day he was apprehended by the police. They later disclosed he was suffering from a mental disorder.