August 2007 - Record-breaking Month for Spam

SoftScan, a reputed security firm in UK, announced that it recorded the highest ever level of spam in August 2007. The company said it trapped the largest volume of each type of spam in terms of a single month as well as a single day.

During August 2007, SoftScan blocked 91.9% of spam mails after successfully identifying them. So the firm thinks spam will further rise at a rate of 40% in September 2007 with already showing signs of rising.

This was the third time in the current year that spam levels have increased breaking its previous records, said Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. Sourcewire published this in news on September 5, 2007.

The firm pointed out that during the last week of August 2007, there were huge surges of YouTube spam that replaced the PDF-based spam and other types of document spam that were highly prevalent in the month. The growth in spam levels reached a peak of 96.89% in August 2007. This level broke the records of June 2007 when it was at 96.55%

By contrast, virus levels showed record dips accounting for only 0.28% of all e-mails that SoftScan filtered in August 2007. The virus families among the top five in August 2007 with respect to their ranks were phishing contributing 54.37% of all spam while e-card held the second rank with 17.49% of contribution. spammers used a new trick with fake tube to add 10.96% to the total amount of spam. Another trick with the fake Web account was in the fourth position making a 6.1% contribution while an old trick with the downloader occupied the fifth place making 4.38% of contribution to total spam in August 2007.

There are no signs that the high spam levels would diminish anytime soon so SoftScan believes the trend of high growth in spam would continue in September 2007 and possibly show higher amounts. A new version of the Storm worm e-mails, which pretends to be a YouTube video film, is the spammers' latest social engineering trick that the firm expects to stay during the coming few weeks, said Diego d'Ambra.

Related article: August Finds New Additions to Malware

» SPAMfighter News - 9/17/2007