Spam Volumes Spike According to Security Vendors

Spam levels all over the world reached a record high in April 2007. The significant number of e-mail viruses that helped to build botnets was partially responsible for this. According to Postini Communications, spam and viruses accounted for about 93% of total e-mail traffic in April, reported Echannelline in news published on May 16, 2007.

The list of Top Ten viruses of Postini estimated comprised of Trojans, viruses and other malware. Those categories that frequently filtered in order of percentages were - Chat and Instant Messaging with 23.2%; Search and Portals with 11.36%; Business and Services -6.4%; Hosting and IT Services -5%; Music - 4.68%; Blogs/ Newsgroups -3.82%; News and Magazines -3.68%; Pornography -3.49%; Dating and Relationships -3.34%; and Films and TV -3.12%.

With the constant publication of viruses and other offensive material, businesses require putting comprehensive protection against such malware. Web security systems that scour the web from time to time for web threats in place of scanning the URL every time the surfer requests can potentially expose the user, said Daniel Druker, Executive Vice-President, Marketing, Postini. PRNewswire published this in a press release in May second week.

Security vendor SonicWall too presents some figures on malicious activity over the last quarter. It shows that between Q406 and Q107, spam volumes spiked by 44.29%. The junk e-mail comprising of virus, spam, phishing, directory harvest and attacks of similar kinds increased 24.46% during the same period.

Directory harvest attacks with 58% constituted most of unsolicited e-mails for Q107. However, it declined from 63.52% during Q406. Good e-mail climbed up slightly to 6.83% in Q107 from 5.84% in Q406. Despite seeing a rise, phishing e-mails accounted for about 1% of all e-mail in the first quarter.

According to SonicWall, there were waves of malware activity in past two quarters. Towards end of January, the company had detected a temporary increase in directory harvest attacks by 15%. Echannelline published this on May 16, 2007.

According to Doug Bowers of Symantec, currently 40% of spam mails are image spam that has caused the spam traffic to double in 2006. Hardocp published this on May 16, 2007.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 5/23/2007