Kaspersky Lab's latest report on spam and phishing in the third quarter shows that the US, Viet Nam and China are the top three countries producing spam.

The US accounts for 15.3 per cent, followed by Viet Nam with 8.4 per cent and China with 7.2 per cent, the report revealed.

Spam is being used in an increasing variety of tactics to deceive recipients and bypass email filters, although the percentage of spam in email traffic has decreased since the second quarter, according to the report.

It points out that in the third quarter of this year, spam accounted for 54.2 per cent of email traffic, a 0.8 per cent drop from the previous quarter.

A new phishing email trick has also become popular in the third quarter. In order to bypass spam filters, the text of the email and fraudulent links are placed in an attached PDF document rather than in the message body.

Tatyana Shcherbakova, Antispam Analyst at Kaspersky Lab, said: "During the third quarter of 2015 we saw spammers exploit the summer holiday season. A variety of tactics were used, from sending fake notifications on behalf of hotels, to sending fraudulent links in PDF attachments, and requests for money to lonely ‘suitors'."

VNS