Study: 95 percent of all e-mail sent in 2007 was spam
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We're being inundated by spam.  How could community-based approaches help?
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August saw a 10 per cent drop in spam levels, according to email security company Messagelabs. The company said there was a sequential drop in spam with levels falling from 94.
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Money the prime motivator as viruses and spam converge  63.5% of all email during the first six months of 2004 was spam  Over 1.5 million phishing emails intercepted  Spyware makes its first appearance in the spam attack arsenal Sydney. 17th ...
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(InfoWorld) - The European Commission has warned its member states to beef up their efforts to cut spam, spyware and malicious software, after research showed that up to 85 percent of all e-mail received in the European Union is unsolicited.The findings come four years after the EU adopted anti-spam legislation in the form of the e-privacy directive. "It is time to turn the repeated political concern about spam into concrete actions to fight spam," Viviane Reding, the commissioner for Information Society and Media, said in a statement on Monday.If there is no improvement by this time next year, Reding will consider introducing new legislative measures to fight the scourge, she said.She pointed to the Netherlands as an example of how the current legal regime can be used to cut spam. Hollandâs spam-busting unit, known by the initials OPTA, has just five full-time staff and â¬570,000 (US$747,000) worth of equipment, and has succeeded in cutting spam by 85 percent. âI'd like to see other countries achieving similar results through more efficient enforcement,â Reding said.Finland was also singled out for praise. A filtering system there has cut the amount of spam to 30 percent of all e-mail, from 80 percent two years ago, the Commission said.âWe encourage other countries in the Union to develop similar filtering means,â said Martin Selmayr, Redingâs spokesman, at a press conference Monday.The Commission is urging other countries âto lay down clear lines of responsibility to use the tools available under E.U. law effectively." Better cooperation with enforcement authorities from other countries, including countries outside the Union, is essential to defeat the spammers, the Commission said.The U.S. remains the single biggest source of spam, accounting for 22 percent of all spam received in the EU, the Commission said. China is the second largest source, accounting for 13 percent. France and South Korea rank joint third at 6 percent.The U.S. and the EU have agreed to tackle spam through joint enforcement initiatives, the Commission said.Last year, Ferris Research estimated spam to cost â¬39 billion worldwide, while fellow researcher Computer Economics calculated malicious software to cost â¬11 billion worldwide.The Commission's latest communication on spam is available here in several languages.
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(InfoWorld) - Pornographic spam dropped to an all-time low in February, as spammers concentrated on health-related products and other general product pitches, according to a report from vendor Symantec Corp. And similar to software, spam is also increasingly being localized. The Symantec report on spam also said that there was a rise in gambling-related spam in German, Italian and French, while previously it was only mostly in English. Symantec drew the conclusions from its own data, as do many security vendors that publish trend reports based on their own monitoring methods. Pornographic spam comprised just 3 percent of the total amount of spam last month, the lowest figure ever recorded, Symantec said. Overall, about 70 percent of the e-mail messages monitored by Symantec were spam, half of which originated from computers in North America. Improvements in blocking and filtering methods have driven spammers to use new techniques to get into inboxes. Some 38 percent of the spam sent in February used images in messages, which makes it more difficult for security software. Messages appear to be more unique, allowing them to bypass a filter. Spammers also are using text slanted at upward or downward angles. The method hampers optical character recognition technology, which tries to read the text within images, Symantec said. Â
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So you think you get a lot of spam, maybe a few hundred per day? Well think about the amount that bill gates gets at Microsoft, over 4 million a day apparently!
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The majority of spam mailings received around the world originate from the United States according to software company Sophos. In order to compile their list, company researchers monitored all spam messages that were sent to their network during 2004.
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The number of e-mail worms fell sharply in 2007, security vendors say.
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To curb spam, getting your Hotmail via Outlook/Express won&#39;t be free much longer ... posted 12:49pm EST Tue Sep 28 2004 - submitted by Christopher R. Anderson.
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(InfoWorld) - E-mail worms, not long ago the scourge of the Internet, have declined sharply in 2007, a security company has revealed. According to UTM security vendor Fortinet, the incidence of mass-mailing worms has declined by 5 percent each month since the start of the year, putting the once-feared worm well below other types of attack in terms of volume. The figures come from the company's The State of Malware report for June 2007. Viruses, spyware, and software exploits have remained roughly stable in volume throughout the same period, while Trojans have been climbing since February to represent the number one threat. Much less common mobile, IM, Linux, and non-mailed Win32 worms have all shown marked declines, albeit from relatively low levels. The company offers a variety of explanations for the marked decline. Users are now more aware of the need to mistrust e-mailed attachments, while corporates are employing better gateway security to strip e-mails of malicious code. Another possibility is that attackers might be moving from mass-mailing techniques to targeted attacks as a better avenue to profit. This theory is backed up by separate figures from MessageLabs published earlier this week that uncovered evidence of attacksÂ targeting named individuals in companies.Â Although rare by their nature, such attacks are reckoned to have a much higher chance of success than generic mass-mailing attacks. The age of the mass-mailing worms is not about to end, however, and could simply have entered a period during which it will decline to low levels before spiking from time to time. The best recent example of this isÂ the Storm wormÂ of January, which presented a high point against which worm volumes were bound to decline as the year wore on. The unique danger of worms is their ability to spread automatically in ways that can clog bandwidth before systems can react. Because worm detection systems are now so finely tuned, such malware has to do as much of its damage in possible within the first hour of spread, after which it will be filtered aggressively by security gateways. The worm's future could increasingly be as a form of malevolent political or terrorist protest rather than as a tool of criminal profit.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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Spam messages are increasingly plaguing e-mail inboxes, but more Internet users are accepting them as a fact of life, a new study has found.
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In the first column of this year, I discussed computer security outlook and hopes for 2008. I forecast more of the same that we saw in 2007: more spam, more malware, more bad guys basically owning the Internet and our connected computers. I don't see any trends or new leaders with significant power to change the status quo.
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AOL has seen a sharp decline in the amount of spam received and reported by members, the Time Warner unit said today. The company released figures showing a 75 percent drop in the spam reported by subscribers
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The Story: Even when there?s good news on the security front, there always seems to be bad news to balance it out. And while we think this news is important for you to know, it?s not an exception to the Good News/Bad News Syndrome.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    The use of e-mail-borne executable virus attachments dropped sharply in 2007. In particular, spammers have dialed back their use of so-called image spam, which tricks filters by embedding text within an attached image.According to IronPort Systems, outbreaks of viruses embedded in e-mail attachments totaled 860 in 2006 and 844 in 2005. But as of mid-October 2007, attacks totaled just 360. Dave Mayer, an IronPort product manager, said it?s likely that outbreaks will total 450 by the end of the year ? a drop of 47 percent. It appears that evildoers are moving on: ?Traditional viruses have been around for years, a long enough time to harden defenses against malicious attachments,? he said.Earlier in the year, IronPort, Symantec, and McAfee all noted that image spam, which appeared about two years ago, is waning, now that defenses have improved. Filters have now gotten better at scanning the contents of the attachments, leading spammers to link instead to images elsewhere.Mayer, whose company specializes in e-mail and Web security, says spammers are now placing those images on free photo-sharing sites ? the ones people use to send vacation photos to friends and family ? and embedding links to those images in their junk messages. These are difficult for spam filters to block because the same sites are used for legitimate photos as well.But as the abuse of e-mail attachments has declined, other types of threats have escalated. For example, outbreaks of macro viruses, aimed at Office-type applications, have risen by 50 percent to 60 percent while URL viruses climbed by at least 250 percent this year, IronPort found.The Bottom Line: It often seems as if the number of threats that you must be on guard against only increases, stretching your resources past the limits. But the truth is that threat profiles change over time, and some things you may be investing in are no longer as great a threat or are now handled by the tools you have in place. So, although you can?t get lax about security, you can focus more on newer threats.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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American spammers resurgent The US was top of the spam charts for the month of June, according to new e-mail security statistics from IE Internet.â¦
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Conceding he is "what people hate about the Internet," a 22-year-old retired spammer predicts that the problem of unsolicited e-mail will only get worse, aided by faster broadband speeds and consumers who respond to spammers and buy their products.