Smaller companies experienced 10 times more spam in 2004
Even as attention to the cost and prevention of spam reached a high point in 2004, threats to e-mail systems grew worse as the incidence of spam remained at 75-80 per cent of e-mail, virus attacks grew threefold, and directory harvest attacks (DHAs) continued to plague corporate e-mail servers, according to a report from e-mail security firm Postini. Smaller companies such as those with 100 users or less received up to ten times more spam per user than large businesses (10,000 users or more). Certain industries, including publishing, advertising, legal, and real estate, received more than ten times the amount of spam per user per day than organizations in banking, financial, manufacturing, electronics, food & beverage, and pharmaceuticals. The average company experienced 150 directory harvest attacks per day, making this type of attack the least visible and most underreported threat in 2004. Virus infected e-mails tripled as a percentage of all e-mail, encompassing 1.5 per cent of all e-mails in 2004, up from 0.5 per cent in 2003. As much as one percent of all spam is some variety of phishing, a particularly threatening act of sending e-mail apparently from legitimate senders to trick users into revealing their passwords or confidential information. More than one third of all spam is sent by zombie networks that use innocent victims’ computers as a conduit for delivering spam to others. The report reveals that DHA attacks are alarmingly widespread, with the average attack consisting of 250 invalid e-mail deliveries attempts. The result is that the average company is plagued by almost 40,000 invalid delivery attempts per day.
Reproduced from an article published by DMeurope.com
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