Total new pieces of malware actually declined in October, according to the latest threat report from security software vendor AppRiver.
However, as eSecurity Planet reports, spammers were plenty busy in last month, sending out hundreds of millions of messages a day to users around the globe.
Image spam, either contained within an unsolicited email message or obscured on an infected website, continued to plague Internet users last month, peaking at more than 2.2 million identified instances on Oct. 5 and averaging between 1 million and 1.5 million instance a day for the bulk of the month.
“October was business as usual,” AppRiver researchers wrote in the report. “Though we saw less of it, malware was still stopping by for a visit, while spam traffic decided to increase in malware’s absence.”
Researchers at security software vendor AppRiver said the total amount of spam circulating the Internet in October surged 28 percent from September but the number of new malware pieces actually declined.
The total number of spam emails in October fluctuated between 80 million and 150 million pieces a day, according to the company’s latest Threat and Spamscape report (available in PDF format).
