Massive Volume of Inbound E-Mails to SMEs Are Spam

On September 4, 2008, IT Force, an Irish technical services and consulting company, released a research report in which it revealed that about 92% of all e-mails came to the company as well as to its clients during August 2008 were spam.

The company analyzed more than 1,187,452 e-mails and established that 1,090,286 were spam. According to it, the Top Ten malware list included Email.Trojan-9 and Trojan.Delf-5385 as the most commonly used viruses by spammers. Some other top viruses included Email.PornTeaser, Trojan.Zbot-1966 and Trojan.Zbot-1962.

The research further disclosed that countries producing most spam region-wise included China, Belarus and the US, excluding Ireland.

However, according to the research, viruses coming via e-mail were falling, as the volume of spam mails containing viruses were extremely small, around 1% of the entire spam. The reason behind this fall is that security vendors in the industry were proactively enhancing their abilities to detect such viruses and organizations were also adopting these solutions.

Joe Molloy, Sales Director for Managed Services, IT Force, says that in the last few months, IT companies have been successfully eliminating viruses, leading to a significant drop in the malware's volume, as reported by siliconrepublic on September 4, 2008.

Also, phishing sites crafted to take advantage of any software vulnerability they find, installs the Zeus Trojan onto the victim's computer. Zeus is a dangerous Trojan as it gathers data from Internet-based forms, seizes screen shots, harvests browser passwords as well as controls the computer remotely.

Furthermore, IT Force believes that hacking criminals might be using a Trojan or virus to infiltrate home computers. The malware might then enter the victim's PC and deceive the end-user into opening legitimate software.

Besides, spammers are increasingly developing and applying new methods to evade enterprises' conventional anti-spam solutions. These attacks, known as 'Spam spikes', take place when unique domains are offensively targeted. The attacks could be extremely dangerous, particularly to SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), as their servers get overloaded with the spam mails, preventing inbound orders and communications from clients.

Similarly, SFA (Small Firms Association) has also said that spam is particularly threatening to the small and medium size market.

Related article: McAfee Alerts Windows about Accessibility Hole in Vista

» SPAMfighter News - 9/17/2008