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Spam volumes hold steady

March 06, 2006

 
Postini processed over 22 billion emails in February and found that after blocking 14 billion emails as directory harvest attacks (DHA), spam totaled nearly 4 billion, an increase of 2% compared to January. Legitimate email as a percentage of total SMTP connections remained virtually unchanged from January to February. Only 15.5% of all messages were legitimate email.


 

 

 

 
Phishing volumes in February totaled nearly 3 million which was 65% lower than the very volatile month of January.

Viruses returned to their normal level of 1.5% of all email in February, with Postini stopping over 40 million viruses.

Phishing and viruses are harder to call, and tend to fluctuate from month to month based on a range of variables such as the emergence of vulnerabilities.

The company also filtered 2.2 million instant messaging (IM) conversations in February, stopping such IM worms as FakeMSN, Lamo.Worm and Loxbot. Unchecked, these IM worms can install spyware, adware, keystroke loggers, and root kits on victims' PCs.

Managed e-mail provider MessageLabs predicts that spam might rise in the short term, although this is after a marked and consistent decline since a peak in July 2004, when the company said an astonishing 94.5% of its e-mail traffic was made up of spam.

MessageLabs reports that nine out of ten e-mails sent to businesses in India are now spam, as compared with 77% in Hong Kong, 70% in Israel, and 64% in the US. Japan had the lowest spam rate of any country measured, at 24%.

 

 
   

 

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