Saudi Arabia emerged out as the leader in the entire GCC region as the source of spam during the third quarter followed by the UAE, said Kaspersky Lab, a top developer of secure content management solution.

Releasing the Q3 report at Gitex, Kaspersky Lab said the entire GCC countries accounted for only 1.29 per cent of all global spam. The main reason that there are such low volumes of spam originating in the region is due to the relatively low number of users, the expert added.

The country with biggest population in the region, Saudi Arabia, is a local leader when it comes to sources of spam (0.96 per cent) just like in the same period last year, said the report by Kaspersky Lab.

Even though Saudi is the most populated county in the Middle East region, its population can’t be compared with that of countries like China or India. That’s one of the reasons why the amount of spam even from this country is so low. The second reason is that users are careful about protecting their computers.

The share of spam in mail traffic differs slightly from country to country. In the third quarter the global average fell 2.8 percentage points compared to the Q2 and averaged 71.5 per cent.

On the global scale, more than 50 per cent of all spam messages in the world originated from just two countries: US (26.7 per cent) and China (25.5 per cent), the report stated.

Kaspersky Lab said the malicious files were found in 3.9 per cent of all email traffic during the third quarter. The country ratings based on the number of mail antivirus detections show that Germany was the leader, accounting for 10.66 per cent of such detections; the US was rated second in Q3.

"Our mail antivirus made about 1.37 per cent of all global detections in the GCC region which is slightly more than in the same period last year," said the report.

On the frequently detected malicious programs worldwide, Kaspersky Lab dubbed the Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen as the number one troublemaker across the globe. This malicious program is actually an htmlpage that copies the registration form of a financial organization.

One of the most popular malware family in the third quarter was Bacdoor.Win32.Androm. This is a malicious program that installs a spam-bot to the user’s machine.

The two most detected malicious programs in the region were Worm.Win32.Mabezat.b and Email-Worm.Win32.Mydoom.m, said the statement from Kaspersky Lab.

Both of them are clearly not targeting anything particular,but just hop from one PC to another distributing themselves via all the emails they can find on an infected machine. It also shows that the region is not a favorite among cybercriminals, it added.

On phishing scenario, the report said one third of all attacks detected in GCC had targeted banks and other financial organizations whereas worldwide this share was about 20 per cent. Phishing attacks on search engines took third place in GCC during the period.-TradeArabia News Service