Kaspersky Lab: 2016 is the year of ransomware in spam

In its Spam and phishing report for the second quarter of 2016, Kaspersky Lab notes that 2016 is the year of ransomware Trojans sent through spam emails. Most of the spam messages sent throughout Q2 were notifications about bills, invoices, or price lists that were supposedly attached to the email; the attachments contained a Trojan downloaded, and, in most cases, the malware loaded the Locky encryptor. Statistically, spam accounted for 57.25% of the global email traffic over the quarter. The USA, Vietnam, and India remained the main sources of spam, while Germany, China, and Japan were the top three countries targeted by malicious spam. The report also shows that Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo were the top three organisations attacked most frequently by phishers.