Spam Made Up 94% Of All E-Mail In December
The Postini report says the rise of botnets and image spam is causing e-mail systems at some companies to melt down.
By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
Jan 29, 2007 02:00 PM
Legitimate e-mail now constitutes a rounding error when compared with spam, thanks to a standing army of more than a million zombie PCs waging war on in-boxes worldwide on any given day.
Some 94% of all e-mail last December was spam, according to Postini’s annual communications intelligence report, which the managed e-mail security company released today.
In 2006, the volume of spam rose 147% by Postini’s measure. The company attributes the surge in spam to PCs that have been commandeered by cybercriminals without the knowledge of their owners.
In and of itself, this sounds like the same mixture of marketing and reporting that messaging security firms have engaged in for years. And it is that. But that doesn’t diminish the real difficulties businesses face in coping with spam.
“There were two fundamental changes in the world of business communications in 2006 that are going to get even bigger in 2007,” says Daniel Druker, executive VP of worldwide marketing for Postini. “The major event in communications security is the emergence of botnets. This has changed the game, the dynamics, and economics of the Internet security marketplace. When the bad guys can now harness more than a million computers around the world and use them to push an increasing amount of attacks, that’s a major change.”
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