SPEAKING OF SPAM

By M.S.Welles

Spam is as bad and annoying thing, there's no doubt about it. According to a recent report from our friends at Symantec Corp. 90.4% of all corporate network message received in April 2009 were unsolicited e-mails.

This represented an increase of 5.1% over the March figures for unsolicited e-mails. MessageLabs monthly report on threat trends also reported that nearly 58% of all spam is traceable to botnets.

As if that wasn't enough, spammers are experimenting with new ways to sneak around corporate filters. It's become commonplace for a spammer to rent legitimate network services and then blast a large amount of spam at the network of a specific ISP.

The idea behind this action is to push as many messages as possible onto the network prior to it being detected by filtering software. Estimates are that hundreds of such messages are sent each day and completely avoid detection.

Social networks have also taken on increased importance to spammers. Because of difficulty in filtering social networking spam at the corporate firewall, a great deal appears to come from friends of the recipients.

Whether the spam is really being blasted by friends or not is open to interpretation. However, overall, spam has become a major headache regardless of age or occupation.