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Friday, 20 July 2007 |
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Junk and malicious e-mail on the rise as some defences stumble.
Industry estimates have levels of spam – currently calculated at over 31bn messages per day – on the rise. What’s worse, spam is now linking with viruses and, according to a new survey, many defence mechanisms are falling down on the job and failing to provide adequate protection.
In its latest report on the top twelve spam-relaying countries over Q2 2007 IT security and control specialist Sophos found that the overall global volume of spam rose by around 9% compared to the same period in 2006, while the ‘Email Threats Trend Report’ just published by virus protection and anti-spam house Commtouch reckons that between 85% and 90 % of all e-mail is now junk or malicious.
Experts at SophosLabs scanned all spam messages received in the company's global network of spam traps, and revealed that the
USA continues to relay more spam than any other nation, accounting for 19.6% of the total. Although
China with Hong Kong is the second top spam dog with 8.4%, six European countries –
Poland,
Germany,
France,
Russia, the
UK and
Italy – have the dubious distinction of a combined spam tally that, at 21% of the total, exceeds that of the
USA.
As well as becoming more numerous spam messages are becoming more sinister, combining with and using the same botnets to distribute both types of e-mail-borne threats, sometimes even in the same e-mail message. “The same botnets used to spew spam are being used to send malware-infected e-mail,” reports Commtouch president and cto Amir Lev. “The e-mail-borne malware sent by botnets can steal password and personal data, harvest e-mail addresses and sometimes even launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The fact that the same bots are being used for all types of malicious activities is evidence that the enemies have converged.”
And, although e-mail is mission-critical to enterprises - 50% more important than mobile voice service, two times more important than desktop telephone service and ten times more important than fax according to research from analysts and consultants Brockmann & Company – protecting it against spam can be a hit and miss affair.
Brockmann and Company’s new independent, self-funded ‘Spam Index Report - Comparing Real-World Performance of Anti-Spam Technologies’ looked at eight anti-spam technologies from the three main technology classes - filters, real-time black list services and challenge-response servers. When evaluating technologies with the Spam Index, lower scores represent the best performing technologies. The report found that the best performing anti-spam technology is challenge-response, based on that technology’s lowest average Spam Index score of 160. The 160 score is 50% less than the next lowest average score of 316 achieved by hosted services, indicating that challenge response is twice as effective as hosted services for prevention of spam. The worst performing technology was filter-based ISP solutions, with a Spam Index of 442.
John Williamson |
