Computers infected by the Conficker worm could cause a meaningful rise in spam levels for the next quarter, according to the Q1 2009 Internet Threat Trends Report by Commtouch® (Nasdaq: CTCH). The multiple variations of the worm have infected approximately 15 million computers around the world according to researchers.

Highlights from the Q1 trend report include:

Loan spam jumped to the top of the list of top spam topics, with 28% in the first quarter, possibly reflective of the global economic situation.

Users of social networking sites were targeted by new, more complex phishing attacks.

Computers/Technology sites and Search engines/Portals are among the top 10 Web site categories infected with malware and/or manipulated by phishing according to the Commtouch Data Center.

Brazil continues to lead in zombie computer activity, producing nearly 14% of active zombies for the quarter.

Spam levels averaged 72% of all email traffic throughout the quarter and peaked at 96% of all email messages in early January. It then bottomed out at 65% in February.

Spammers attacked large groups of an ISP’s users and moved to the next ISP in a targeted spam outbreak.

An average of 302,000 zombies were activated each day for the purpose of malicious activity.

“To block the flood of spam that the massive botnet created by the Conficker worm is capable of sending, new spam detection methods beyond traditional content filtering must be employed,” said Amir Lev, chief technology officer of Commtouch. “Detection based on analysis of patterns is the best tool to block massive spam attacks as these patterns will be created in seconds and the IP addresses of the infected computers will be tracked within minutes.”

Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection™ and GlobalView™ technologies identify and block messaging and Web security threats, including increasingly malicious malware and phishing outbreaks. More details, including samples and statistics, are available in the Commtouch Q1 2009 Internet Threats Trend Report, available from Commtouch Labs at: commtouch.com/download/1348.

NOTE:

Reported global spam levels are based on Internet email traffic as measured from unfiltered data streams, not including internal corporate traffic. Therefore global spam levels will differ from the quantities reaching end user inboxes, due to several possible layers of filtering at the ISP level.