40 Trillion Spam Scheduled for 2008

The Ferris Research, which studies messaging and content control, has declared that around 40 Trillion spam mauls will be sent in 2008 costing the worldwide business US$ 140 Billion. This is a noticeable increment from the 18 Trillion which were sent in 2006 and 30 Trillion in 2007.

Unfortunately, spam is not just a thing which invades our inboxes; it has become a security concern. Many of the spam tries to prohibit security on the system like trying to read messages or redirecting the user to site loaded with malware, viruses, adware etc.

The company added that users should not be left to handle the spam on their own as many of the users do not think practically before clicking on any attached links. Rather, the users should keep in mind to explain the attached links to other co-workers. After all, those cute little kittens and spam mails can load several botnets and porn links respectively.

Also, it is only theoretical that efficient filtering program enables authentic mails to pass and restricts the spam mails. Rather, it can be put is like this: filters can mistakenly enable spam to pass through is a false negative and they can mistakenly restrict authentic email is a false positive.

Ferris Research estimated that if an employee receives 5 spam mails per day and devotes around 30 seconds on each of them, he will waste almost 15 hours a year on spam mails. And if this is multiplied with the hourly rate of every employee to the organization, we will receive the conservative idea of the cost of spam to that company.

Further, after recognizing a mail as spam, the filtering software will either restrict it or quarantines it, which allows the user to see it later. Also, the latter way increases the chances of false positives which needs time and effort that the users would not like to devote.

Ferris also said that the users and companies that got spam have to pay a huge amount of money to delete them. But the analysts added that the cost of finding the missing authentic email is even greater. Shockingly, those companies can seek higher costs through missed chances because of false positives as they can never view any request for proposal that a consulting organization fails to get.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 10/16/2008