September was another banner month for security software vendors and malware authors as the “Here You Have” worm impacted corporate email servers around the world.
But as eSecurity Planet reports, it wasn’t the only serious security threat to consumers and companies in the past month.
AppRiver said beginning on Sept. 10 its filters began blocking an inordinately large number of image spam messages, essentially spam code hidden beneath images displayed within emails.
The security software firm blocked almost 2.5 million image spam messages on Sept. 10 alone, a 900-percent surge above normal daily image spam rates. The flow of these image spam missives tapered off for about a 10-day period before enjoying another resurgence in the last week of the month.
September was another busy month for enterprise IT departments forced to deal with a barrage of security threats, led by the “Here You Have” worm and an influx of new image spam campaigns that were just a small part of the more than 45 million new pieces of malware identified this month.
According to security software vendor AppRiver’s monthly Threat & Spamscape Report (PDF format), overall spam volume was actually down slightly from August, but malware purveyors were particularly adroit at using malicious .html attachments running hidden Javascript code to infect users’ PCs and mobile devices and bog down corporate email servers.