14 DAY TRIAL // MX Logic Inc. has revealed that the overall email traffic has jumped approximately 40%, fueled by a consistent jump in the volume of spam and malicious email traffic. According to statistics released by MX Logic, an average of 77.4% of all mail managed via the MX Logic Threat Center is junk mail.
"While email-borne viruses had been leveling off gradually in the earlier part of the year, the upward trend for email and Web threat activity in the third quarter is particularly significant, because we typically don't see that kind of increase until November and December," said Sam Masiello, director of Threat Management, MX Logic. "Businesses that operate without email and Web security may be getting inundated much sooner than the holiday season."
However, SoftScan reported that - in the past month - spam levels have jumped to 89.07%, and announced that it has detected as much as 95.95% spam out of the total email traffic, in a single day.
"This is bad news," says Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "The spam highs normally seen in the summer are bought about by the low levels of normal business email as many people are away from work taking their summer holiday. This time levels of legitimate email have stayed the same and instead the spike is purely due to a marked increase of nearly four percent in spam."
Secure Computing Corporation, a developer of enterprise gateway security, indicated that the volume of image spam has increased over 200% and that this form of spam accounts for more than 30% of all the junk mail.
"Traditional anti-spam software depends on content filtering techniques such as keyword filtering and Bayesian analysis to detect spam. Even the technology used to recognize characters from images, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), is not effective on today's image spam," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief technology officer of Secure Computing. "Spammers are using advanced mathematical and graphical techniques like random modification of image pixels and dynamic construction of images from multiple components to bypass spam filtering tools."