Spam Spikes Caused Widespread Destruction

According to the officials of Message labs Ltd on June 4, 2007, furious spam attacks, termed as "spam spikes", are reported to be blasting individual domains. These can bring disastrous results for small and medium size business just like a fully planned attack to bring a company to a halt.

An attack was monitored by UK based Security Company and it was noticed that in an 11-hour period a spam run of more than 10,000 messages struck in only a single domain, which is nearly equal to 75% of the total messages pointed at that particular domain.

In May 2007, worldwide Message labs has labeled 72.7% of all emails as spam, which is less than the six-month average of 75.3% and far less than the highest figure of 94.5% recorded in July 2004.

Message labs continue by saying that the focus of spam spike is to cause losses for appliance anti-spam system that depends entirely on signatures instead of desktop antivirus software.

As per the Message labs, this attack has proved to be dangerous for small and medium size business. It leads to a situation of an overloading of email servers and, consequently, it escapes the anti-spam devices which depend on signature developed over many years.

As per the reports of Secure computing on June 5, 2007, chief security analyst at Message labs, Mark Sunner, said that this month the hackers will continue their series of attacks and will bring heavy destruction.

Further, Sunner claimed that with a greater number of spam spikes it has become important for the companies to cope with this by adopting a strong security approach which can protect the employees and the network from deadly codes.

The data of May (2007) has revealed that the on-going trend of targeted attacks focused on one piece of spam at a single receiver. The number of micromanaged attack went down from 716 in March (2007) to 595 of total emails in April (2007). Furthermore, during April 2007 the number of those one-off attacks, which depend on the documents of malformed Microsoft Office, increased to 95% from 80%. 64% of the attacks made use of a malevolent word document, 17% used Excel and 14% exploited a bogus or infected Power-point file.

From the May 2007 results, the Message labs gathered data that included a claim that phishing attacks made for 79% of all emails intercepted during April (2007).

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» SPAMfighter News - 6/18/2007