Spam Still a Problem

From where you sit, is spam getting better or worse? Well, from the perspective of the folks at SonicWall, things aren't getting much better.

According to the statistics released by SonicWall last week, in fact, spam, viruses, and phishing attacks increased by 4 percent in Q1 2007, and comprised 37.4 percent of all e-mail, with the remaining 6.9 percent being good email -- a 3 percent increase over Q1 2007

SonicWall reports that there are 6.1 billion phishing e-mails sent world-wide each month. And according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group that translates to 37,438 unique phishing web sites detected in May 2007. Okay, that's a drop of over 18,000 from April, but still a big jump from the 7,484 in January 2006.

Most recently phishers have turned their attention to PDFs, Excel, and Zip files to embed come-ons. It was during the second quarter of 2007 that PDF spam emerged as a persistent threat. These types of e-mail attacks typically contain little to no text in the body but attach a PDF file, usually a stock or drug spam message containing malicious code, which, if opened, can be automatically downloaded onto a victim’ s computer.

Data regarding spam statistics collected by SonicWall's was pulled from its Smart Network database of over 1.3 million e-mail users. The results were based on aggregated results from the SonicWall Smart Network from April to July, 2007.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 05:33 PM  Permalink