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Internet Spam Levels Reach All Time High
Spam is getting worse - and gambling is on the list
of offenders
Every Internet user has experienced the irritating and time wasting
hassle that uninvited hard-sell emails - spam - create, and this
week the US specialist network and messaging management company
Ipswitch Inc gave an indication of just how bad the plague has become.
The company published the result of its seventh Spamometer survey,
revealing that 93 percent of all email received is spam; the highest
rate since recording began. This compares with 84 percent the previous
quarter and only 62 percent over the same period last year.
Medication spam accounts for over a third of the total amount of
undesirable messages clogging up the modern inbox, closely followed
by stock tip and phishing emails, which are thought to have been
sent to coincide with the recent change in financial years on April
1st.
Medication and Finance/Phishing categories swopped positions from
the past quarter. 12 percent of spam emails received were classified
as undecipherable due to their makeup of symbols and characters
designed to fool less thorough spam filters.
But perhaps the most worrying trend of all was the new entry of
gambling spam messages designed to ride on the coat tails of the
current online gambling phenomenon across the globe, the company
comments.
The worst spammers are from the following industries:
1. Medication - 34 percent - (up from 2)
2. Finance/Phishing - 33 percent - (down from 1)
3. Undecipherable - 12 percent - (New Entry)
4. Gambling - 7 percent - (New Entry)
5. Pornography - 5 percent - (down from 4)
Earlier this month, IDC published a study warning of a resurgence
of spam and predicted that over 40 billion spam messages will be
sent daily worldwide in 2007 (see previous InfoPowa report).
"Spam volumes are growing faster than expected due to the
success of image-based spam in bypassing antispam filters and of
email sender identity spoofing in getting higher response rates,"
said IDC's Collaborative Computing and Enterprise Workplace research
program VP, Mark Levitt.
"This is a worrying time for corporate communications with
the amount of spam arriving in corporate inboxes showing no sign
of waning," said Tripp Allen, VP of messaging products for
Ipswitch. "The importance of having an efficient antispam filter
that is flexible, extensible and provides automatic updates 24x7,
is now more important than ever."
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