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Spam Hits 95% of All Email

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thats-just-depressing dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spamsuch as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites. Image spam declined to a level of less than 5% of all spam, down from 30% in the first quarter of 2007; also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place."

5 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Summary only link by Lord+Grey · · Score: 5, Informative

    The link referenced in the posting goes to a summary page that is a little light on details. At the bottom of that page is a link to the PDF-formatted report. There's a lot more information there, including some screenshots of example SPAM and malware sites, trends in attack vectors, zombie systems, etc.. Interesting stuff.

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    // Beyond Here Lie Dragons
  2. SPAM @ 95%?! by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Thank God for Gmail and its excellent spam filtering! I don't think I've had any spam hit my inbox in 2 years. :-)

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    The game.
  3. Re:call me a cynic, but by l0b0 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The statistics for CERN yesterday: 90% rejected, 7% (manually) moved to spam folder, 3% good mails. And that's not even including those that are just deleted without being moved to the spam folder. Scary tendency.

  4. Greylisting to the rescue! by Trifthen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Seriously.

    I hate to bring up anecdotal evidence, but, while I still get spam, my flood has gone down to a relative trickle simply by plugging postgrey into postfix. I could probably reduce it to zero with a bayesian filter, but I won't bother. Scanning through my logs, my server rejects literally thousands of spams every day, and I'm just one guy with two email addresses and a handful of aliases.

    So, it would come as no surprise to me that spam volume is that high, I just never see it. I almost want to turn off my filter for a day just to see what would happen.

    Well, maybe not. :)

    --
    Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
  5. Re:That's not an unrealistic number by SaDan · · Score: 3, Informative

    FortiNet FortiGate 1000A hardware firewalls, which block 99% of the SPAM we receive (a couple slip through for various reasons), and we run Zimbra with AV/AS scanning enabled.

    The FortiGates are configured to just drop the SPAM, so 100% of SPAM detected by the firewalls never get past the firewalls.