70% were Spam Out of 210 Billion E-mails Sent Daily in 2008

Pingdom, a website monitoring firm, has released an extensive summary of global 2008 Internet statistics. The results show that 53.8 Trillion spam mails were sent during 2008, accounting for 70% of the total mails.

The research also reveals that in 2008, almost 210 Billion e-mails were sent daily to web users all around the world.

Further, the company claimed that it discovered 1 Million PC viruses during April 2008, an increase of 468% in harmful code as compared to 2007. Moreover, out of the global total of 1.4 Billion web users, Asia occupies the maximum share with around 578 Million web users. Europe is in the 2nd position with 384 Million, followed by North America with 248 Million users.

The company also said that just one web host (McColo) was behind 75% of all mail spam. Further, the effect of closing of McColo on the spam levels around the world was striking as the number of spam slumped by 66%-75%. In addition, there were reports that almost 80% of spam are sent by just 100 spammers.

Moreover, Facebook has the maximum number of photos than any other site, with over 10 Billion photos displayed on the social networking site. Other photo exchanging websites Flickr and Photobucket have around 3 Billion and 6.2 Billion photos respectively.

With the widening network of Facebook, spam, particularly junk mails containing harmful attachments or links, continue to present a big trouble for the IT sector. Further, spammers are becoming more creative in their attempts to deceive users, using famous sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The total number of websites on the Internet at the end of 2008 was reported at a striking 186,727,854 with almost 31.5 Million new sites were included in 2008. Thus, the rising number of sites raised the amount of spam on the Internet during 2008. Spam is harmful in nature and is meant to infect user's system through sophisticated link to harmful sites or developed malware attachments for stealing private information.

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

» SPAMfighter News - 2/7/2009