How’s your inbox? It appears that spam volume continues to rapidly increase, with 91% of all emails now being classified as “unwanted”.
Postini processed nearly 70 billion emails during the period September to November and reports a 59 percent increase in spam during that time. The daily volume of spam has increased 120% in the last 12 months according to the company. Postini is referring to the influx as a “state of seige” and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.
Bear in mind, just because you can’t see the spam, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. If you’re lucky enough that your ISP or web host has effective spam filtering and you’re only getting a handful come through a day; before you become too critical of your provider, give some thought as to what might happen if that email filtering were suddenly taken away :). There are limits as to how far filters can be tweaked until there’s a sharp increase in false positives; i.e legitimate messages are filtered out.
Postini states huge networks of hijacked computers known as botnets are the major culprits for the increase. It serves as a good reminder to ensure your anti-virus software, firewall and spyware scanners are up to date. You may be spewing out spam from your system without even knowing it.
On the virus side of things, Postini reports the following as being the major offenders for the Sept-November period:
stration
netsky
mytob
mime
mydoom
Interesting to see MyDoom still kicking around in its various forms. MyDoom first appeared in January of 2004.
|
Spam filtering services review Sick of spam/virus emails in your inbox? You never have to look at these emails again. Learn more about email filtering and try a free trial! :: Web site certification - Build trust and reassures potential clients - Get a free seal! :: Minimize credit card fraud with Maxmind - IP Geolocation and Online Fraud Prevention :: PCI compliance - what you need to know |
As I’ve said before, I do fear a critical mass situation where there’s just nothing more that filtering can do, or if there is a slowdown in filtering evolution and innovation - and then the spammers will get the upper hand. Even if such a “victory” for them was only for a short time; it would play havoc with company communication systems globally.
For, example there has been some great innovation in recent times such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for scanning email image content, but spammers have already succeeded in implementing anti-OCR scan filtering strategies.
Read more of the Postini spam report
Learn more about how virus and spam email wind up in your inbox
Trial a free anti-spam service.
No comments yet.
Leave a comment (moderated)