Record Increase in Spam, Reports Ipswitch

Network management developer Ipswitch Inc., which also provides messaging solutions and transfer of secure files, announced the outcome of its Spamometer survey in the last week of January 2008. The seventh survey released on January 28, 2008 revealed that spam accounted for 96.4% of the total e-mail, registering a peak rate since the start of the survey.

This is in comparison to 84% in the quarter from July to September 2007 and just 62% during the final quarter, October-December of 2006. Spam promoting pharmaceutical products accounts for more than one-third of all undesirable messages crowding the inbox, with stock spam and phishing e-mails following closely.

The financial-type spam indicates an e-mail pattern where recipients are requested to contact illegal call centers and give away their financial information. Besides, Ipswitch's study detected 72% of spam as originating from botnets.

According to Ipswitch's Spamometer survey, finance spam mails have grown from just 12% in the third quarter of July -September 2007 to about 41% during the holidays.

Service Director and Business Process Analyst, Clive Longbottom, Quocirca Ltd., said that the trend apparent from Ipswitch's figures reveal the continued shift from opportunistic and pragmatic spam pushed out from a single individual for personal gain to criminal gangs that in a fully organized manner use botnets to push out large volumes of spam while remaining anonymous. Marketwire published Longbottom's statement on January 28, 2008.

Clive Longbottom continued to say that this degree of sophistication indicates that there is only one answer to the problem of spam that is to halt it before the junk reaches the inbox of the end-user.

In addition, President Tripp Allen of the Messaging Division of Ipswitch commented that the existing trend of 'Vishing' attacks underlines a new problem of cyber criminals being a little ahead of law that allow them to cause considerable destruction before they can be appropriately penalized. The impact of Vishing on individuals victimized is already evident, Allen said, as reported by Marketwire.

Tripp Allen also added that the situation portends worry for enterprise communications with no sign of spam waning from arriving in business inboxes.

Related article: Recruitment of ‘Money Mules’ – New Way To Phish

» SPAMfighter News - 2/7/2008