Spam email is more than a headache

  Spam Mail is a cost / productivity burden and security threat to all companies. Spam spreads viruses, jams networks, steals information and worst of all… it continues to grow every day.

 Just think about how much time you spend every day deleting spam email from your Inbox. Or what about the constant interuption of new email arriving that distracts you from your work, only to find you have more spam. 

 Let say you spend 40 minutes per day deleting spam. 30 days per month that's 20 hours per month of lost productivity. Do you see how much spam is costing your business? Example: at an average hourly rate of $15 per hr x 20 hrs = $300 per month per employee. How about your executives time?

A report produced by Commtouch in collaboration with Panda Security has revealed that 80 percent of all email sent globally in 2007 was spam. The percentage peaked in the last quarter of the year with figures as high as 96 percent.

IBotnets were largely responsible for these extraordinarily high rates
of spam. Bots are programs that go resident on computers listening for
commands and giving their creators control over compromised systems.
Once they have control over several hundred computers, cyber-crooks can hook them all up to create botnets. These networks were responsible for 85 percent of spam sent in 2007.

One of the new trends observed in 2007 was the use of new formats for spamming advertisements. We saw the first cases of spam in MP3, Excel, and even links pointing to video spots posted on YouTube.

The use of images to evade detection by spam filters was another
emergent trend in 2007. Such images often included URLs, which although not active, still served to enhance the efficacy of attacks, as those who bothered to type the address in their browsers would be more interested than users who casually clicked on an active link.

Much of the image-based junk mail was 'pump-and-dump' spam, designed to drive up prices of certain stocks. "This is a simple ploy. After buying stocks at cut-down prices, spammers send an email out alerting to an imminent and dramatic rise in the price of these shares. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, as when spam recipients start to buy the stocks, the price goes up. Needless to say, however, the first to offload the shares and cash in are the spammers", explains Luis Corrons.

Regarding the subject matter of junk mail in 2007, some 70 percent of
spam was related to sexual health. Replica watches accounted for 10
percent, followed by pirate software (6%), gambling (4%) and stocks
(3%).

Source: www.pandasecurity.com