In this month’s report we take a look at social media scams so far in 2013. What we have noticed is that fake offerings, such as bogus opportunities for discount purchases, has dominated the social landscape this year, making up 82 percent of all social media attacks.
In the realm of data breaches, August saw a decrease in the number of breaches, with seven reported during the month. However, there were a further nine breaches reported in August that had occurred earlier in the year, bringing the total to 125 breaches resulting in a total of 91 million identities being exposed in 2013 so far.
In other news, 213 new mobile malware variants were discovered this month, a modest increase since July, but nowhere near the numbers we saw in June. There were 469 new vulnerabilities discovered in August, a 13 percent increase compared to the total in August of 2012.
The global spam rate fell 2.4 percentage points from July to 65.2 percent. The top-level domain for Poland (i.e. .pl) comprised almost 48% of spam-related domains in August, topping the list two months in a row.
Finally, financial-themed phishing emails top the list of topics, comprising 66.8 percent of all phishing attempts blocked. Many of these phishing attempts appear to have come from Japan, which is responsible for 55 percent of phishing emails.
We hope you enjoy the August Symantec Intelligence Report. You can download your copy here.