High Spam Rates in Irish Inboxes

The rising trend of spam to Irish inboxes that accounted for 10% since January 2007 continued in May to reach 64%.

The Irish company IE Internet scanned e-mails whose analysis helped to arrive at various figures. The analysis showed that the rate of spam rose from 53% in January 2007 to 64% in May. The Irish e-mail hosting company compiled the statistics by managing about 35,000 e-mail users in the business sector.

Most of the spam to Ireland originated from France and the U.S. Ken O'Driscoll, chief technology officer at IE Internet thinks that the spammers were not based in France but they might have compromised French PCs and built zombie networks to push out their spam mails. The armies of zombie PCs are able to hide the actual identity and location of the spammer and that makes it less risky in sending out spam compared to other methods, said Ken O'Driscoll in a statement. The Post IE published O'Driscoll's statement on June 5, 2007.

In May, the volume of viruses went down to just above 5% than it was in April 2007. In this connection O'Driscoll said, while the number of e-mail viruses was declining consistently, malicious authors were continuing to write new ones. The re-mergence of the virus W32/Document-disguised-based!Maximus in May 2007 is an example of new versions being written.

In a spam situation when the rate rises above 60%, it becomes more troublesome for people without spam filters deployed because each lot of ten emails contains six junk emails. While spam operations continue to move away from the region of North America, large amounts of junk e-mails are still originating from zombie computers and open relays connected to U.S. broadband networks and cable, said O'Driscoll. Silicon Republic published this statement of O'Driscoll in March 2007.

O'Driscoll describes spam as "a big business". Its dramatic rise in Ireland in the past few years is an indication that spam mails are becoming more convincing to people in handing over their money. In addition, spammers are fast to adapt with new ways of eluding traditional spam filters.

Related article: Hack.Huigezi Virus Attacks China PCs Rapidly

» SPAMfighter News - 6/18/2007