Spam Peaks To 97% In December 2007

According to a warning by SoftScan on January 7 2008, despite several arrests of high profile nature and court cases that turned out successful throughout 2007, spammers continue to beat law enforcement.

SoftScan reports that there has been a record 97.02% spam level and just 0.11% of viruses in December 2007. The statistics suggest that not even 3% of total e-mail leaving outboxes during the period was genuine.

Such an increase in spam occurred despite major sapmmers' arrests during the past year, including that of Robert Alan Soloway, recognized as the 'Spam King' in the United States, and two Korean programmers found to send nearly 1.6 billion spam mails.

According to SoftScan's CTO Diego d'Ambra, the vast increase in spam all through 2007 once again demonstrates that spammers are still not being adequately deterred from their high scale lucrative business. Sourcewire published this in news on January 7, 2008.

Albeit less amount of business e-mail moved out in December 2007 due to the Christmas holidays, yet d'Ambra believes that this was not likely, as SoftScan's scanning has not revealed this trend prior to December 2007 or during the months of summer holidays. Vnunet.com published this in news on January 7, 2008. The report has the backing of SoftScan's 2006 records that showed around 90 percent of e-mails in the same month that year as spam.

Diego d'Ambra further added pointing to SoftScan's monthly statistics that the different public holidays and weekends can be quickly identified as the time when there were less genuine business e-mails delivered. In December 2007, however, other than the lower levels during the first week, the amount of spam remained relatively high throughout. Sourcewire reported this statement of d'Ambra.

According to SoftScan, the IT Security Company there was a huge 96.3 percent of junk e-mails in all e-mail it scanned in November 2007. In the same month it also found a rise in the volume of spam that were pushed out in languages that were not English. However, the amount of virus laced e-mails remained consistently low, with only 0.08 percent of scanned messages in November containing malicious attachments.

Related article: Spam Scam Bags a Scottish Connection

» SPAMfighter News - 1/18/2008