Education continues to be key to preventing infection, said Cluley, who encouraged business organizations to give users initial and also refresher instruction on avoiding suspicious emails.
"The advice is simple: you should never open unsolicited attachments, however tempting they may appear," he said.
The United States remained in the number one spot for relaying spam across the globe, generating 18.9 percent of the malicious emails. Russia has increased its contribution to the world spam problem, soaring from 4.4 percent last year, to 8.3 percent during this time period, according to the report. Turkey, China and Brazil were the other countries on the top-five spam relaying list.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.