Spam Hits 95% of All Email

An anonymous reader writes "Commtouch released its Email Threats Trend Report based on the automated analysis of billions of email messages weekly. The report examines the appearance of new kinds of attachment spamsuch as PDF spam and Excel spam together with the decline of image spam, as well as the growing threat of innocent appearing spam containing links to malicious web sites. Image spam declined to a level of less than 5% of all spam, down from 30% in the first quarter of 2007; also, image pump-and-dump spam has all but disappeared, with pornographic images taking its place."

Summary only link

[Lord Grey]

The link referenced in the posting goes to a summary page that is a little light on details. At the bottom of that page is a link to the PDF-formatted report [commtouch.com]. There's a lot more information there, including some screenshots of example SPAM and malware sites, trends in attack vectors, zombie systems, etc.. Interesting stuff.

SPAM @ 95%?!

[thatskinnyguy]

Thank God for Gmail and its excellent spam filtering! I don't think I've had any spam hit my inbox in 2 years. :-)

Not new.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't "95% of email is spam" reported by the BBC [bbc.co.uk] back in 2006?

And Security Focus has a great article [securityfocus.com] that shows how all of these numbers are totally made up.

Re:call me a cynic, but

[l0b0]

The statistics for CERN yesterday: 90% rejected, 7% (manually) moved to spam folder, 3% good mails. And that's not even including those that are just deleted without being moved to the spam folder. Scary tendency.

Greylisting to the rescue!

[Trifthen]

Seriously.

I hate to bring up anecdotal evidence, but, while I still get spam, my flood has gone down to a relative trickle simply by plugging postgrey into postfix. I could probably reduce it to zero with a bayesian filter, but I won't bother. Scanning through my logs, my server rejects literally thousands of spams every day, and I'm just one guy with two email addresses and a handful of aliases.

So, it would come as no surprise to me that spam volume is that high, I just never see it. I almost want to turn off my filter for a day just to see what would happen.

Well, maybe not. :)

Re:That's not an unrealistic number

[SaDan]

FortiNet FortiGate 1000A hardware firewalls, which block 99% of the SPAM we receive (a couple slip through for various reasons), and we run Zimbra with AV/AS scanning enabled.

The FortiGates are configured to just drop the SPAM, so 100% of SPAM detected by the firewalls never get past the firewalls.

Re:That's not an unrealistic number

[SaDan]

Anything we reject will bounce with a 500 category error and an explanation (blacklisted IP, checksum matching, known spamming address, known spamming URL). We have had calls, but they've been from people who were blacklisted because they had machines infected with trojans or were part of a bot-net sending out tons of SPAM.

People are upset until we ship them a copy of the logs pertaining to their account or IP address. Once they have the proof, they tend to argue less, or even ask for assistance (which we provide in most cases).