SoftScan Newsletter - Spam Rises 39% in Septmeber
www.softscan.co.uk
Statistics from SoftScan show that spam levels rose by 39% during September. The total amount of email stopped as spam by SoftScan was 93.51%, with levels near or over 98% being reached on some days.
“Since June this year we have seen an increase of 95% in the amount of spam we stop each month,” comments Diego d’Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. “We are fortunate that the reputation filter we introduced last year, which effectively hangs up the phone to servers sending spam, catches the vast majority of junk mail before it reaches our spam filters, preventing them from becoming overloaded. But for organisations that are just relying on spam filters alone, these past few months must have been a nightmare for network administrators.”
When an email is accepted by SoftScan's servers, the Reputation Filter performs an assessment of the sender. It looks-up the IP address in a number of internal and external databases that collect data about the senders of spam and viruses. SoftScan constantly monitors and rates the quality of the external databases to ensure that it only blocks emails from "black-listed" senders.
With the exception of a few days at the beginning of September when spam levels dropped to around 88%, the remainder of the month has been consistently very high. SoftScan predicted in August that spam levels to rise by 40% in next month and stated that one of the groups it believed spammers would be targeting was the large number of students returning to educational institutions after the summer break, whose surfing habits make them an ideal target for malware writers.
