There is good news this month on the email-based front of the threat landscape. According to our metrics, the overall spam rate has dropped to 49.7 percent. This is the first time this rate has fallen below 50 percent of email for over a decade. The last time Symantec recorded a similar spam rate was clear back in September of 2003.

By Ben Nahorney, Cyber Security Threat Analyst – Symantec
Phishing rates and email-based malware were also down this month. However, there were
57.6 million new malware variants created in June, up from 44.5 million pieces of malware
created in May and 29.2 million in April. This increase in activity lends more evidence to the
idea that, with the continued drops in email-based malicious activity, attackers are simply
moving to other areas of the threat landscape.
Ransomware attacks are up in June, with over 477,000 detected during the month. While
still below the levels seen at the end of 2014, this is the second month in a row ransomware
attacks have increased since they reached a 12-month low in April. Crypto-ransomware is
also up in June, reaching the highest levels seen since December 2014.
In other news, after a busy month in May targeted attacks against the Manufacturing
industry leveled out in June, dropping from 41 percent to 22 percent. Manufacturing still
comes out on top in terms of sectors subject to targeted attacks, but activity is now in line
with what is being seen in the Finance, Insurance, & Real Estate sector and the Services –
Professional sector, which come in at second and third place.

PME in trouble

Large enterprises were the target of 25.1 percent of spear-phishing attacks in June, down from 39.2 percent in May. In contrast, 38.1 percent of attacks were directed at organizations with less than 250 employees.

New record for ransomware

The overall phishing rate has decreased slightly this month, where one in 2,448 emails was a phishing attempt.
There was a one zero-day vulnerability discovered in May, the Adobe Flash Player CVE- 2015-3113 Unspecified Heap Buffer Overflow Vulnerability.
There were more than 57.6 million new pieces of malware created in June, up from 44.5 million created in May.
Ransomware attacks were up in June for the second month in a row, where over 477 thousand attacks were detected.
 Crypto-ransomware was also up duing June, reaching its highest levels since December of 2014.

Social & Mobile sharing malware

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