Four Fold Increase in eMail-Based Malware

Recently Network Box have been noticing an unusual increase in eMail-based malware. They have not seen such an increase for several years, and this is occurring globally:

Four Fold Increase in Malware

More statistics can be seen at http://response.network-box.com/.

A glance at the malwares-per-hour statistics that our customer boxes are reporting clearly shows that the malware is coming in from hundreds of thousands of sources, in emails with varying subjects.
So far, Network Box heuristics such as NBH-BGTRACK and zero-day Z-scan protection systems are containing this increased threat. 

The increase is more than 4 times baseline, and all the samples that are being seen are emerging, never-before-seen, zero-day threats.

This increased activity is probably caused by botnet herders attempting to increase the size of their botnets, and this will probably be followed by a corresponding increase in spam levels.

Accordingly, Network Box have raised their alert condition to 3.  It might be that the recent decline in Spam may be reversed.

[InfoSecIsland]