By Allan Maurer
NEW YORK—Noticing more spam in your email box these days? That’s likely because spammers and their “bots” have grown more sophisticated and spam levels soared more than 76 percent in the first quarter this year. That’s the highest rise in two years.
So says a report by New York Web security firm, MessageLabs, which saw small and medium-sized businesses are being pummeled by spam at more than twice the monthly rate of enterprise companies.
“Spammers do not distinguish between the sizes of organizations being targeted,” the report says. “Smaller businesses will receive just as much spam as larger enterprises but are less likely to have defense systems in place.
“For small businesses, spam can very quickly become a silent killer, overwhelming the resources of the mail system before any effective countermeasures can be enforced.”
There’s no end in sight, either, says the report.
Side effect of email?
“Today, spam is considered a side effect of email,” said Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst, MessageLabs. “The majority of small businesses view spam as an ongoing irritation rather than a real threat and have given up on dealing with the issue only to find that bad guys target them even more aggressively. If the first quarter data tells us anything, it’s that malicious activity in the form of spam will only continue on an upward trend.”
Last week, security company Sophos warned IT managers and Webmasters that spammers are hijacking legitimate Web sites to disguise their traffic and throw off anti-spam and antivirus filters.
Using PHP vulnerabilities, they’re hacking into various Web sites and patching their own traffic through them. That makes it more difficult for anti-spam software and filters that are designed to block links to known spammers’ sites.
The March MessageLabs Intelligence Report provides greater detail on all the trends and figures noted above, as well as more detailed trends for the first quarter of 2007.
For the full report see:
www.messagelabs.com/Threat_Watch/Intelligence_Reports.
© 2007, TechJournal South. All rights reserved.
