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Spam rises 39% in September
04/10/07
SoftScan says
that spam levels rose by 39% during September. The total amount of
email stopped as spam by SoftScan was 93.51%, with levels near or
over 98% being reached on some days. In addition, although virus
levels remain relatively low, SoftScan noted a change in malware
activity with a new virus attack each day.
“Since June this year we have seen an increase of 95% in the amount
of spam we stop each month,” comments Diego d’Ambra, CTO of SoftScan.
“We are fortunate that the reputation filter we introduced last
year, which effectively hangs up the phone to servers sending spam,
catches the vast majority of junk mail before it reaches our spam
filters, preventing them from becoming overloaded. But for
organisations that are just relying on spam filters alone, these
past few months must have been a nightmare for network
administrators.”
With the exception of a few days at the beginning of September when
spam levels dropped to around 88%, the remainder of the month has
been consistently very high. SoftScan predicted in August that spam
levels to rise by 40% in next month and stated that one of the
groups it believed spammers would be targeting was the large number
of students returning to educational institutions after the summer
break, whose surfing habits make them an ideal target for malware
writers.
Viruses accounted for just 0.14% of email traffic during the last
month. The top five virus families in September 07 were:
1 – phishing: 71.19%
2 – freegame: 7.04%
3 – downloader: 4.41%
4 – foolball: 3.74%
5 – netsky: 2.85%
Nick Gibson, editor
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Copyright Screen-Studio.com 2007
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