Recent studies have showed great increase in global spam volumes over the last year, pointing to a switch from selling products towards spreading malware.
The 2008 Internet Security Trends Report from IronPort Systems gives a rather alarming estimation that 98 per cent of all email traffic is now spam.
Each day about 120 billion junk messages are sent over the globe, 20 billion having Great Britain as target and this comes as no surprise since the spam business has reached an estimated figure of $200bn a year.
According to Jason Steer, European product manager at IronPort Systems, the techniques used in creating recent malware point to "sophisticated research and development." In his opinion, new security controls led to spammers changing methods and approach. In addition he emphasized that defending against spam, viruses and malware has become quite costly in terms of time and money.
The aforementioned study also revealed that spam has become not so centered on selling products as on growing spam networks.
According to IronPort's Threat Operations Centre, this year alone, 'dirty spam' (containing links pointing to known malware sites) reached an increase of a 253 per cent. Their research also presented the increased risk of identity theft. About 60 million people have experienced personal data exposure over the past 12 months, leading to an estimated $20bn spent on clean-up costs and lost productivity worldwide.
It seems that the average UK computer user has to deal with spam about 10 minutes every day. Moreover, the damage after a malware attack are said to spare the ‘victim’ of $500 with each of such unfortunate episode.
IronPort emphasized the precaution that users should implement as to avoid the pitfalls of spam and malware; their suggestion – anything resembling spam should be deleted at once.
