Spam volumes hit record high

Sydney, Australia – Marshal’s Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) Team today announced total spam volume is at its highest peak ever and has increased 280 per cent since October last year.

According to the TRACE Team, spam levels increased 30 per cent in the past week, coinciding with a resurgence of spam coming out of China and South Korea.

“The increase in total spam volume could be attributed to the dramatic increase in spam we have seen coming out of Asia in the past week,” said Bradley Anstis, Director of Product Management for Marshal.

“The increase in spam coming out of the region is likely the result of a newly activated botnet running off computers in Asia”, said Anstis. “This shows yet again the importance of having adequate malware protection on your home and business computers.”     

According to the TRACE team, users now receive eight spam messages for every 10 emails they receive in their inbox.  

“Approximately 85 per cent of all emails received are spam. If the current increases in spam volumes continue in 2007, users can expect at least 90 per cent of all emails received to be spam by the end of the year.

“Although it is difficult to see the levels dropping over an extended period of time, it is also hard to imagine such high levels of spam in today’s email traffic,” said Anstis.

Spam will remain one the most significant security threats facing businesses in 2007, the TRACE team reports.

“Many in the industry predicted that the spam problem would be resolved by now, yet in 2007 it is difficult to foresee when spam filters will no longer be required,” said Anstis.

MailMarshal takes a multi-layered approach to identifying spam and doesn’t rely on one particular method. MailMarshal SMTP 2006 is an industry-leading email security solution. During the recent surge in spam, even image based Spam, MailMarshal has maintained a spam catch rate consistently higher than 99.5 percent with near zero false positives.

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About Marshal
With new threats disrupting business, productivity and wrecking reputations every day, Marshal’s content security solutions take a proactive approach to identifying email and web vulnerabilities to protect over seven million international users from the risks of email and Internet-based threats.  For more information about Marshal visit www.marshal.com
 

About the Marshal TRACE Team
TRACE (Threat Research and Content Engineering) is a group of Marshal security experts who constantly monitor and respond to Internet security threats. TRACE provides a service to Marshal customers as part of standard product maintenance. The service includes Marshal’s anti-Spam technology known as SpamCensor, found in the flagship MailMarshal solution. TRACE analyses Spam, phishing and Internet security trends and provides frequent automated updates to MailMarshal customers. TRACE also provides “Zero Day” security protection to secure MailMarshal customers against new email exploits the day they emerge.