Hong Kong, 17 March 2011 - Over the past few days, managed security firm, Network box, has noticed an unusual increase in eMail-based malware. Such an increase has not emerged for several years and this is occurring globally.

A glance at the malwares-per-hour statistics shows this:

‘The malware is coming in from hundreds of thousands of sources in emails with varying subjects. So far, our heuristics such as NBH-BGTRACK and zero-day Z-scan protection systems are holding it back, but the increase is more than 4 times baseline and all the samples we are seeing are emerging as never-before-seen zero-day threats. We expect that this increased activity is caused by botnet herders attempting to increase the size of their botnets and this will probably be followed by a corresponding increase in spam levels,’ said Mark Webb-Johnson, CTO of Network Box Corporation.

Accordingly, Network Box’s alert condition has been raised to 3. ‘We will continue to monitor the situation closely. For any suspicious samples, you may please report to us newvirus@network-box.com,’ he said.

For more statistics, please see www.response.network-box.com.