Posted: 04th Oct, 2006 By: MarkJ
Security firm MessageLabs has called on consumers to lobby their ISPs for the inclusion of stronger SPAM (junk e-mail) and
phishing e-mail filtering services. The move follows the groups latest September statistics release:
Spam: the global ration of spam this month is 64.4 percent, a diminutive decrease of 0.1 percent from August. This is indicative that spam is not going away, and that concentrations are expected to increase again in coming months as spammers continue to adopt new techniques.
Viruses: virus and trojan traffic has been steadily declining since the beginning of the year and in Q3 2006 is much lower than for the same period in 2005. In September, the global ratio of email-borne viruses in email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources destined for valid recipients was 1 in 89.6 emails (1.12 percent), an increase of 0.1 percent since last month still a large volume.
Bots: MessageLabs research indicates that bots are increasing in number and distribution, particularly in South American countries, where the use of bots to distribute bank trojans and
phishing scams has now escalated to such a degree as to make them the new 419-scam of the region.
Phishing: September showed a large increase of 0.27 percent in the proportion of
phishing attacks compared with the previous month. One in 170 (0.59 percent) emails was some form of
phishing attack. When judged as a proportion of all email-borne threats such as viruses and trojans, the number of
phishing emails has risen by 21.7 percent, now accounting for 52.4 percent of all the malicious emails intercepted by MessageLabs in September.
Thankfully a growing number of providers in the UK do manage to offer Anti-Virus and SPAM filtering, although there are still a great number that do not.
The good news is that this has steadily been helping to lower the overall virus count; unfortunately SPAM continues to be a problem because most is sent by unscrupulous people and its far easier to identify a virus than it is a junk message.