Report: Spam Now 90% Of All Email

[back9clicks]

Saw this on Cnet:

Spam now accounts for 90.4 percent of all e-mail, according to a report released Monday from security vendor Symantec. This means that 1 out of every 1.1 e-mails is junk. The report also notes that spam shot up 5.1 percent just from April to May.

Symantec's May 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence report reveals other disturbing trends, as well. Rather than just hijack disreputable Web sites, cybercriminals now favor older and well-established domains to host their malware. The report says 84.6 percent of all domains blocked for malicious content are more than a year old. One type of domain now especially vulnerable to threats is social networking, since most of the sites' content is created by users.

"Spammers using better-known and thus more widely trusted Web sites to host malware is reminiscent of the spammers who rely on well-known Web mail and social networking environments to host spam content," said Paul Wood, Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst. "The trustworthy older domains can be compromised through SQL injection attacks while newer sites are more likely to be flagged as suspicious--a temporary site set up with the sole purpose of distributing spam and malware--and thus faster to get shut down."

Where you live also determines when you're spammed, says the report. For people in the U.S., spam hits its peak between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. and then drops overnight. Europeans get a solid stream of spam throughout the day, while users in Asia-Pacific countries find most spam waiting for them in the morning. One reason for this trend, says the report, is that most spammers are at their busiest during U.S. working hours.

The popular CAPTCHA program, which asks the user to type in a series of random characters, is no longer proving as effective as once hoped. Many Web sites have relied on CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) to ensure that accounts are created by actual human beings.

But criminals have now succeeded in generating profiles with random names, apparently by using automated CAPTCHA breakers. The report notes that some major Web sites are now exploring other ways to block automated accounts, such as using photographic images that a user must analyze.

Spam levels had dropped for a short while last year after the closure of several malware-hosting Internet providers. But spammers have since bounced back from those losses by rebuilding their networks.

Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence gathers research on spam and other malware from global data centers that track e-mails and Web pages. Symantec releases a new intelligence report each month.

[Gary A]

I'd guess my percentage of SPAM is about one in fifty. Am I just lucky?

[PeaceBlondie]

90 percent of my Yahoo spam mail goes to the Spam folder, which I never review. Any spam in my inbox, I flag as spam.

[webfact]

Google has an amazing spam filter protection, like Yahoo.

And if you are able to handle your mail with an IMAP client

then you have (almost) nothing to worry about

Edited June 19, 2009 by webfact

[nikster]

I never see any spam in my Gmail inbox, ever. Maybe 1 in 1000 or so, there's a single spam message arriving every few months or so. I post my gmail address freely wherever I am asked.

If they'd only share their spam filtering... my work email, which I don't give out on public forums has about 50% spam. Mac.com, about 1 - 2 spams / day.

[niller74]

Spammers DIRL..

No punishment is too hard for these creeps.

[Tywais]

These are the stats from my firewall server at the office. I run MailScanner with ClamAV and SpamAssassin as a preemptive filter to all our facility e-mail. The 90% pretty closely reflects our statistics considering a small percentage still makes it through.

//edit - actually most of that small percentage that doesn't get blocked gets marked as possible spam by the server and I have Thunderbird send those tagged ones automatically to the Junk filter to check separately leaving my Inbox pretty much clean of spam.

[nikster]

Isn't it a shame that Google doesn't share their spam filtering. I mean - Google has the spam problem solved completely. Not 90%, it's way better than that. If they had a public API they could share this with everyone and basically wipe out spam for good.

[webfact]

Isn't it a shame that Google doesn't share their spam filtering. I mean - Google has the spam problem solved completely. Not 90%, it's way better than that. If they had a public API they could share this with everyone and basically wipe out spam for good.

I trust they will keep their recipe secret until they can sell it for the right amount of $$$$... Google is a business!

[syd barrett]

I have an opposite type of problem with my yahoo mail account; mail from trusted friends ends up in spam/junk folder.

Even though I click not-junk and rescue the message, the future mail from the same sender still ends up in spam/junk folder next time.

This is really getting me angry and having a detrimental affect on my sleep, my personal health and mental state of mind.

Can anyone help?

[Rawkus]

I have an opposite type of problem with my yahoo mail account; mail from trusted friends ends up in spam/junk folder.

Even though I click not-junk and rescue the message, the future mail from the same sender still ends up in spam/junk folder next time.

This is really getting me angry and having a detrimental affect on my sleep, my personal health and mental state of mind.

Can anyone help?

Oooh, oooh, I know this one...