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January 2006 Virus and Spam Statistics
Ant writes "Commtouch reports the January 2006's virus and spam statistics. Its summary said there were four massive virus attacks (including a multi-wave attack of 7 variants) and the most aggressive attacks penetrated before the average antivirus (AV) solution could even release a signature. The data is based on information continuously gathered by the Commtouch Detection Center, which analyzed more than 2 billion messages from over 130 countries during the month of January 2006..."
Not very long ago, when the Kama Sutra (Nyxem.E, MyWife, whatever) worm was released to the world it seemed to take absolutely forever to find anyone with a solution for the removal or even the detection of the thing. I think it was almost a full week before the signatures were widely distributed. Even though this was a attack was very mild (as far as viruses are concerned), what would have been the outcome had this been "the Big One"?
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est - Sir Francis Bacon
That is some interesting research(only 5% of spam is porn?!), but where is spam headed long term? They have that little graph were you can see trends for 30 days, 100 days, or 12 months(though the 30 days and 12 months didn't work for me in Safari), but does anyone have reliable statistics that go back farther?
Is spam burning out, finding new markets, or are people just continuing to send spam even if they don't make a profit on it?
Monstar L
First of all, spamfilters, no matter how good they are, won't solve it. Who has filters? You, me, the rest of the "clued" people. But we wouldn't click on a spam ad anyway, would we?
The people who do click on one simply have no clue what's going on and thus have no spamfilter. So spamfilters are simply for our convenience of not having to deal with junk.
Laws won't make spam go away. Unless you have a globally universal and most of all equal law concerning spam, all it does is to go to another place. And since making spam legal equals tax income for a country, I'd give a the possibility of the RIAA realizing that copycrippling their music isn't the right way a higher chance of coming to reality.
So Spam is here, and it's here to stay. It will maybe become more sophisticated, and it will most certainly become used by people wanting to plant other malware onto your system (e.g. the combination of spamming a link and planting a bogus WMF onto the referred site).
But Spam won't stop.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If this report proves anything, is that running antivirus software is not good protection. You have to educate users not to open suspicious attachments, not to run IE, and to keep their systems updated (every modern OS does this automatically! Windows also does this since SP2). A firewall and/or NAT router is always a good idea too.
I don't run antivirus (except the occasional ClamWin run if I downloaded something I don't trust completely), and I manage to keep my computer clean just by following the above rules. Antivirus won't protect you from ad/spyware anyway, and these things have become worse than viruses.
If the antivirus vendors can't keep up with new viruses, you might aswell stop paying for antivirus. After all, it won't protect you.