Spam Swells In Large Volume

A Hawaii spam filtering company estimates that following a tripling of spam since June 2006, e-mail by less than 10 percent is legitimate. And the situation is getting worse this holiday shopping season. Hoala Greevy, CEO of 'PauSpam', said that there has been 'Black Friday', 'Cyber Monday' and now he calls it 'Junkmas', or 'Junk Mail Christmas'. He further says that spam levels are rising, a large part due to voluminous 'virus-infected computers' that dispatch masses of spam mails.

Many would like to know how junk e-mail got the name "spam". Spam can be compared with the 'canned meat product' that citizens of Hawaii love so much. They eat by a greater per capita than any other state in the Union. But spam - those offensive undesirable e-mail messages that suffocate inboxes and claim to be 'sure-fire love formulae' - is not palatable. A British comedy troupe, Monty Python, has used spam as the central part of their popular skit.

'Postini', the mainland e-mail security company reports that unwanted e-mails have amplified to the huge figure of 7 billion in November alone. It has jumped from 2.5 billion in June this year. These spam mails are jamming corporate e-mail passages and delaying arrival of authorized business e-mails.

According to Pali Kaaihue, CEO of 'LavaNet', the fight to reduce the amount of spam by evolving techniques is constant. LavaNet has developed a filtering product called "Spammo". Kaaihue says many present anti-spam solutions are evolved around an open source system called "SpamAssassin". It enables 'Internet Service Protocols' and 'mail server administrators' to design custom rules for spam filtering. By bad or good luck, spammers too have access to these programs and therefore, are able to combat any new filters promptly.

PauSpam provided with more statistical figures on November 28, 2006. He told that 92% of all e-mail his company filtered over the previous seven days was spam. 1% was equally divided between virus attacks and 'phishing' attacks. And the other 7% were legitimate e-mails.

Over the past years, spammers have sniffed millions of computers to send out unsolicited commercial e-mails without the owners realizing it.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 12/2/2006