Researchers Announce "Best Spam" Award

Ladies and Gentlemen… a heavy round of applauds for the winner of the prize of "Best Spam"! I know it may seem early to already give out this prize, but based on a research by Marshal experts I have to hand it to PDF spam. And let me tell you why - as the study shows us, the ratio of e-mails containing attachments has dropped down real low, now becoming something not worth mentioning. But wait! While image spam was sinking, PDF spam managed to "resurrect" the percent of attachment spam. Got to hand it to PDFs - they really clogged the inboxes, before going down in September. PDF file attachments managed to make a difference (for the worse) and to be honest I doubt that we'll see a growth in attachment spam, any time soon, if at all!

The study shows that the number of unwanted messages is up, but the message size is down. Al this makes spam more efficient - more messages means more targets get hit and smaller messages means less loading time which also translates in more targets getting hit. What can I say? Spammers are getting smarter and smarter, while only a small part of users seems to be aware of all the threats that are out there. Some are so confident in the safeness of the web that they get easily scammed, via spam messages, of course!

Also, as the same report concludes, even though the number of spam messages is up, the bandwidth consumed by spam is a bit lower now, than it was at the beginning of the year. That's all because of the fact that message size is decreasing. However, this is not necessarily a good thing - though the message size is smaller, a lot of incoming connections are headed for the mail server, a fact which may have a detrimental effect on its performance, as seen in the same Marshal report.