Spam levels hit record highs again
http://www.dailyfix.co.uk/articles/450/1/Spam-levels-hit-record-highs-again/Page1.html
By Chief Editor
Published on 5 Sep 2007
SoftScan announced today that during August it recorded the highest ever level of spam stopped in one month and also the highest level of spam in one day. In the last few days huge waves of "You Tube" spam appears to be replacing the pdf and other document spam that has plagued users over the last few weeks.
Spam hits record levels
Augusts spam and virus statistics from SoftScan
London, UK (5th September 2007) SoftScan announced today that during August it recorded the highest ever level of spam stopped in one month and also the highest level of spam in one day. In the last few days huge waves of You Tube spam appears to be replacing the pdf and other document spam that has plagued users over the last few weeks.
During August, SoftScan stopped 91.90% of email, after correctly identifying it as spam. Spam levels peaked during the month when 96.89%, was stopped as spam. This record was only broken a couple of months ago in June when levels of 96.55% were recorded. SoftScan announced in August that it expected to see spam rise by 40% during September and that it was already seeing a significant increase, which is reflected in these figures.
For the third time this year spam level records have been broken, comments Diego dAmbra, CTO of SoftScan. With no evidence that the
increase is likely to abate anytime soon, we believe this trend of exceptionally high spam levels is likely to continue and that September
will see even higher levels of spam. The latest variant of Storm Worm emails, which now poses as a You Tube video featuring the email recipient, is just the latest social engineering tactic in a long line of storyboard changes we expect to see over the next few weeks.
Virus levels by contrast are done to record lows, accounting for just 0.28% of emails stopped by SoftScan during August.
The top five virus families in August 07 were:
London, UK (5th September 2007) SoftScan announced today that during August it recorded the highest ever level of spam stopped in one month and also the highest level of spam in one day. In the last few days huge waves of You Tube spam appears to be replacing the pdf and other document spam that has plagued users over the last few weeks.
During August, SoftScan stopped 91.90% of email, after correctly identifying it as spam. Spam levels peaked during the month when 96.89%, was stopped as spam. This record was only broken a couple of months ago in June when levels of 96.55% were recorded. SoftScan announced in August that it expected to see spam rise by 40% during September and that it was already seeing a significant increase, which is reflected in these figures.
For the third time this year spam level records have been broken, comments Diego dAmbra, CTO of SoftScan. With no evidence that the
increase is likely to abate anytime soon, we believe this trend of exceptionally high spam levels is likely to continue and that September
will see even higher levels of spam. The latest variant of Storm Worm emails, which now poses as a You Tube video featuring the email recipient, is just the latest social engineering tactic in a long line of storyboard changes we expect to see over the next few weeks.
Virus levels by contrast are done to record lows, accounting for just 0.28% of emails stopped by SoftScan during August.
The top five virus families in August 07 were:
- phishing: 54.37%
- ecard: 17.49%
- faketube: 10.96%
- webaccount: 6.14%
- downloader: 4.38%