88% of Mail Reaching Organizations in July was Spam, Says Study

In July 2007, 87.54% of all e-mail reaching organizations were spam, according to TrustLayer Mail, the managed security service from Panda Security. The figure asserts the continuation of the trend from earlier months when spam received by companies accounted for 90% of total mail. The data has been compiled from a research of firms that have contracted the service.

Spam is actually an illegitimate email that is normally an advertisement message. junk e-mail in such large percentages can take toll on productivity in terms of time spent on scanning and deleting the annoying messages. They also eat up computer IT resources by consuming bandwidth, clogging mailboxes, and taking up disk space.

Organizations today find spam as a major problem associated with technology, said Jesus Fernandez, Product Manager of TrustLayer Mail in a statement. Computing News published it on August 7, 2007. The problem is not just loss of productivity or damage to resources, but there is also risk of infection from these junk messages, Fernandez added.

In July this year, most spam mails contained worms and that caused some worry. The specific threat that was most frequently detected was Netsky.P. The situation was similar in the previous month of June as well. Netsky.P sometimes is responsible for almost 50% of all malware spotted in unsolicited e-mails. This particularly notorious family of worms produced as high as 10 variants in the top-twenty malware charts that TrustLayer Mail prepared.

During the same period, adware and trojans were responsible for 49.6% of total infections that Panda ActiveScan detected in June 2007. While trojans caused 26.89% of all malware infections (accounting for an increase by 0.75%), adware caused 22.72% infection. These statistics confirm that most malicious codes were designed to make financial gains through fraudulent means.

Other kinds of threats that followed the same pattern as that of May 2007, in order of their percentages, were worms in the third position with 8.71%; backdoor trojans following with 3.87%; dialers at 3.34%; and spyware at 2.99%. Bots occupied the last place in the list causing 2.58% of infections.

The high percentages of adware and trojans show that the only purpose of cyber-criminals is to make money.

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

» SPAMfighter News - 8/20/2007