Email Malware Gets Big Uptick

Commtouch is reporting this week that there's a huge spike in the amount of email with attached malware

From their blog:

Virus distributors have steadily decreased their usage of email as a means of malware distribution. The more popular methods nowadays include the use of drive-by downloads as well as “voluntary” downloads of “shockwave updaters” and “movie codec files”.

But the last day or so has seen very high levels of emails with attached malware. At one point these accounted for over 30% of all email received. The sudden increase can be seen in the graph

It's surprising since the amount of malware had actually been going down from email and going up in web delivery. It makes me wonder if the increase in web security is driving malware writers back to email as a delivery mechanism. Maybe they think security companies have gone lax in email as they've stepped up web security. The key takeaway? Keep your security up to date, no matter what it's protecting.