Kazakhstan remain leadership on spread of spam in Central Asia, but its share decreased by 0.85% in February and it made up 92.36% of total undesirable emails in the region. At the same time, total share of Kazakh spam in the world rose by 1.11%. Kazakhstan was on 23rd place in the world among spam source compared to 26th place in February.

Uzbekistan was in the second place with 2.63%, which is 0.24% less compared to February. Uzbekistan’s share makes up 0.04 of spam in the world (104th place). Kyrgyzstan is on the third place and it figure grew by 0.9% to 2.58% in March. In overall rating, Kyrgyz Republic is on 113rd place (125th place earlier).

In March, India remained the most popular source of spam, accounting for 11.42% of the total volume of spam (an increase of 2.59 percentage points).

Brazil took over from Russia in second place having distributed 6.6% of all spam, an increase of 2 percentage points compared to February’s figure. Russia came third having distributed the same amount of spam as in February – 4.8%. Indonesia (4.3%) and Italy’s (4%) figures also remained practically unchanged, leaving these two countries in fourth and fifth places respectively.

The volume of spam originating from South Korea decreased by 0.8 percentage points and accounted for 3.3%. As a result it dropped from fifth to eighth position, making way for the UK (3.9%) and the USA (3.4%) which moved up to sixth and seventh places respectively. The change in the amount of spam distributed from these two countries did not change considerably from the previous month however.

It was announced in mid-March that the joint efforts of Microsoft and US law enforcement agencies had resulted in the closure of the Rustock spam botnet.

Rustock first appeared on the Internet back in 2006 and according to some estimates, was responsible for 30-40% of all spam. The closure of the botnet was announced on 17 March, though the operation itself took place a day earlier.

Kaspersky Lab’s experts registered a decrease in the volume of spam between 17 and 20 March. During this period the amount of spam in mail traffic fell by 3 percentage points compared with the average figure for the first half of March. The overall number of spam emails fell by approximately 15 percentage points.

However, on 22 March there was an upturn in the volume of spam traffic. It appears that spammers and botmasters learnt a few lessons from similar closures at the end of 2010 and despite the size and output of the closed Rustock botnet they managed to quickly redistribute their capacities. Nevertheless, the anti-botnet activities by law enforcement agencies continue to bear fruit and please anti-spam fighters.

A series of destructive earthquakes, a tsunami and the unfolding disaster at a nuclear power station have gripped the world in recent weeks. People in many countries have looked to help the people of Japan with food, medications and other essentials by donating funds to various humanitarian organizations. A number of sites have appeared on the Internet with information on how and where to transfer money to help the victims.

Spammers immediately started exploiting these charitable initiatives by distributing fraudulent emails that claimed to transfer money to the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations.

Of course, the users who sent money to the accounts specified in these emails only ended up donating money to the spammers.

The tragic events in Japan were also used to distribute a malicious code. As is often the case, human curiosity played into the hands of the fraudsters: users were invited to find out some of the more shocking details or to view footage from the disaster area.