In this month’s report we investigate a new social networking avenue that scammers are attempting to leverage: Instagram. They’re doing so in order to gather personal details and persuade users to sign up for premium-rate mobile services, among other things, generally by creating fake accounts:

The scams take on a number of forms, from spam comments, to fake followers, to liking photos in the hopes people will check out their profiles, which in turn often contain more spam links.

We’ve also noticed a significant drop in email spam volumes this month. The global spam rate has dropped by more than 10%, from 75% of email traffic in September, down to 64.8% in October. It’s good news overall, resulting in a 50 percent drop in spam volume over a two-month period.  We take a look at some of the likely causes for this significant drop.

Finally, we take a look at the evolution of ‘ransomware’ and discuss some of the most recent discoveries in the threat landscape during October.

For further details on these stories and more, click to download a copy of the October Symantec Intelligence Report (PDF).