Around 80 per cent of e-mails on the internet, equivalent to 6.5 billion emails a day, are spam. These unwanted emails are not only generated by professional spammers, but also by ‘botnets’ - where the PCs of unsuspecting customers are secretly infected with rogue software to form a robotic network that generates vast quantities of unwanted spam . These compromised machines can be used in turn to attack other PCs and websites.

The new spam detection system selected by BT – Content Forensics™ from StreamShield Networks – scans millions of e-mails a day, providing BT with detailed reports on the location and size of spam-related problems originating from the BT network. Not only does the StreamShield Networks’ solution save time and resources by automatically identifying spam problems, it can prevent valuable bandwidth being wasted on unwanted spam and virus infected traffic.

BT’s Customer Security team can then take immediate action against professional spam operators, which could include terminating rogue accounts and adding offending IP addresses to industry-wide blacklists.

At the same time, BT can focus more effort on contacting and helping customers rid their PCs of botnet infections – reducing the likelihood of e-mail traffic from BT networks being blocked by other providers and third-party e-mail systems.

“In a world-first, we’re turning the tables on professional spammers and cutting off this scourge of the internet at source”, said Stratis Scleparis, CTO at BT Retail. “We are delighted to work with StreamShield Networks on this innovative approach which both tracks down and reduces spam messages on our network, and at the same time helps our customers overcome the threat of infection by bots.”