Spam Mails to Companies Estimated 90% in May

TrustLayer Mail, the managed security service of Panda Software compiled data to find that 90% of e-mail reaching company inboxes in May this year was spam.

Spam causes more trouble than just annoyance. In the absence of a good filter system it is likely to take lot of time off employees in deleting unsolicited e-mails. The spam mails often contain malware that poses risk to company security. For all such reasons TrustLayer stops inbound spam mails and all malware before they can enter corporate computers, said Victor Omaechevarria, Product Manager at Panda Software. Help Net Security published Omaechevarria's views on June 4, 2007.

TrustLayer Mail has detected computer worms from the Netsky family and trojans belonging to SpamtaLoad family as the most frequent malwares. A lot of exploits by iFrame also resulted in numerous incidents. IFrame exploit is generally an HTML code that attempts to take advantage of security holes in Internet Explorer.

In another survey by e-mail security company Postini; of all e-mails traversing the Internet, 80% is spam. But a non-profit company, Pew Internet & American Life Project found in a new survey that unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) is a much-reduced problem in terms of the number of people it affects as compared to 2003.

In this new survey, 52 percent of respondents complained they received pornographic spam that was a drop, compared to 63 percent in a similar Pew survey in 2005 and 71 percent in 2004. Further only 18 percent of users said they considered spam a big problem that was a decline from 25 percent in 2003.

People are simply getting accustomed to spam, just as they would habituate with traffic congestion or air pollution. E-mailers are also learning to tackle spam wisely, said Deborah Fallows, senior researcher at Pew Internet in a statement. Miami Herald published it on June 4, 2007.

Not much time has passed when technology experts called spam a threat to widespread use of e-mails considering the vastness of the problem it posed. Politicians reacted and legislated laws prohibiting fraudulent e-mails, and government agencies and prosecutors pursued spammers who violated the law.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 6/16/2007