The Deadly Duo: Spam and Viruses, January 2005

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Despite reports that spam volume was either holding steady or even slightly diminishing in January, fresh data from a variety of sources indicate quite the opposite.

Approximately 10 of every 12 email messages sent are spam, and 1 out of 63 is infected with some form of virus, according to the latest figures from Postini. The former figure is roughly consistent with Ferris Research's finding that spam has consistently accounted for 70-80 percent of email sent since April 2004, gradually increasing over time.

One spam watchdog group, Mail-Filters.com, measures the percentage of spam of total email sent to have increased to as much as 93 percent in January 2005. This is up a full 6 percentage points, from 87 percent, as measured by the group in January 2004.

""We really don't see any indication that spam attacks will decrease in the near future," said Daniel Ashby, SVP at Mail-Filters. "In fact, we see evidence that not only is spam on the rise, but the threat to computers and personal information from that spam is increasing as well."

Yet, as Ferris points out, the "percentage of email sent" metric doesn't provide a clear indication of volume. When graphically depicted in terms of volume of spam messages per week, the unrestrained growth of spam from early 2003 through the end of 2004 is clear.

Now we see that, far from slowing down, the volume of spam continues to grow at a fairly consistent rate," wrote Ferris's Richi Jennings. "So tell me again... is spam leveling off?"

Viruses

"The most startling statistic in the chart was the rapid increase in Exploit.Iframe.B detections," said Steven Sundermeier, VP of products and services at Central Command. The virus exploits a known vulnerability within Microsoft's Internet Explorer that allows an attacker to execute potentially malicious code on users' machines by tricking them into opening an infected HTML-based email, explained Sundermeier.