Spam outnumbering legit emails by almost 9 to 1

Dec 3, 2004: The percentage of spam clogging up our mailboxes reached record levels last month, with almost nine out of every ten messages junk mail.

That is according to figures released by email management and security provider Postini, which processes around 1.7 billion messages each week for 4000 corporate clients. It reported that only 12 percent of all email messages processed in November were legitimate, a two percent decrease from last month. Of the 6.9 billion messages processed by Postini last month, 88 percent were malicious attacks such as spam, phishing, viruses, and directory harvest attacks.

“As evidenced by the increase of email attacks at the connection level this month, spammers are getting smarter about how they approach their targets,” said Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing at Postini.

Lochart added that it's important to have security at the connection level to reduce email intrusion threats early on. "Simple content filtering alone is ineffective as a means of stopping spam and viruses," he said.

Directory harvest attacks (DHAs), where spammers attempt to hijack and steal an enterprises entire email directory and use it to send out junk email attacking corporate email servers, rose dramatically in November, by around 25 percent. Postini alone fended off over 19 million DHAs.

As for virus activity, Postini prevented a total of 92 million virus instances from entering corporate networks, representing 1.3 percent of all email. Netsky, Bagle and Sober occupied the top three positions.

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