Based on data received from more than 4,000 IronMail appliances deployed globally, CipherTrust Research indicated significant volume increases in the amount of spam, including:
-- On November 3, a spike in spam introduced by Mytob and Bagle outbreaks made its way around the Internet and raised the global volume of e-mail over eight percent overnight.
-- On November 21, the most recent outbreak of Sober pushed its way through the e-mail ecosystem bringing with it thousands of new infected zombies that caused more than a 15% increase in the amount of spam.
-- Over the past two weeks, this swell has held up with overall e-mail volume over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend up 25% over that of the previous weekend.
-- Over the last six months, CipherTrust's TrustedSource global threat correlation engine had been identifying an average of 170,000 new infected zombie computers each day. Since the Sober outbreak, the number of new zombies sending spam and virus messages increased by nearly 50%, bringing the average total number to more than 250,000 new infected IPs each day.
"While the late summer showed some signs of spam volume declines, November started on quite a different note," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief technology officer at CipherTrust. "The propagation of these threats proves spammers and attackers continue to be as malicious as ever."
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