Postini blog on spam trends

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Date: December 13, 2007 7:30:58 PM EST
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: Postini blog on spam trends


1 Billion Messages Not Served
Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 10:16 AM
Posted by Adam Swidler, Product Marketing Manager, Postini

Postini is a recent addition to Google that offers solutions that
help enterprises make their existing email infrastructure more
secure, compliant and productive. We process email for more than
35,000 businesses and 12 million end users, and block about 1 billion
messages per day, which is a good sample size to report on global
spam trends for businesses. In 2007, Postini data centers recorded
the highest levels of spam and virus attacks in history. Much of this
was fueled by an increase in the number of botnet computers being
used to send spam. Botnets are networks of infected PCs, usually with
broadband Internet connections that are co-opted by hackers and used
to send spam and virus attacks. Often they are compromised without
their owner's knowledge. We started to see these botnets kick in back
in September of 2006. Since that time, spam volumes are up more than
163 percent. We saw a peak of activity in October 2007 where volume
was a 263 percent increase from September 2006 and Postini blocked 47
billion spam messages, more than 320 Terabytes of spam (now that's a
lot of spam). The average unprotected e-mail user would have received
32,000 spam messages in their in-boxes so far this year. Talk about
lost productivity. In fact, Nucleus research estimates unchecked spam
can cost a company up to $742 per user.

But what's really different this year is the innovation with which
spammers attempted to evade detection by spam filters. In the early
part of 2007, image spam was used heavily, with the spam content
(such as "pharmaceuticals for sale," "hot stocks," etc) contained in
an image attached to the message. Over the course of the year image
spam declined and was replaced by PDF spam, document and spreadsheet
spam and even multimedia spam. That's right - an audio file promoting
a particular stock. We saw examples of compressed and password
protected emails as well. All this effort to deliver spam content in
email attachments had a significant impact on the size of spam
overall. Taking 7.5 Kb as an average spam message size, an
organization with 100 employees (that didn't use a hosted solution to
block spam outside the firewall) would have wasted 22Gb of storage
and bandwidth. Who wants that sitting on their servers?

...

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2007/12/1-billion-messages-not-served.html



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