Mega-Spam: No Breathing Space

The website ThisIsLondon.co.uk reports that “image spam” could bring the internet to a standstill. “At first, they seem like your average junk email, containing share tips or an advertisement for Viagra, along with a small, slightly garbled picture.But this, experts say, is the spam that could bring the internet to a virtual standstill this year.”

“To bypass anti-spam software, the emails use an image instead of text. In the past six months, this image spam has seen a massive increase and now represents 35 per cent of all junk email, according to security software firm F-Secure and image spam is taking up 70 per cent of the bandwidth bulge. The emails, generally containing stock tips, come from gangs and even bored teenagers in the United States and Russia trying to inflate prices in a swindle called ‘pump-and-dump’. They promise that a cheap, usually American, stock will take off. The perpetrator then dumps his stock as buyers leap in before it collapses.”

“Dmitri Allperovitch of computer security company CipherTrust said: ‘They're niche companies with no profit and no products, so when you see a spike from almost no trades to two or three million when the spam is sent out, you know there were a lot of people who fell for it.’” Is your PC a slave unit to such schemes?

Are you unwittingly passing bogus information to millions of other people?

Stuffing Our in Bins

All that spam you’re getting? You are not alone. A Reuters report out of London says that “criminal gangs using hijacked computers are behind a surge in unwanted e-mails peddling sex, drugs and stock tips.”

According to Postini, a U.S. email security company spam messages have tripled since June and now account for nearly 90% of the e-mails sent worldwide. "E-mail systems are overloaded or melting down trying to keep up with all the spam," said Dan Druker, a vice president at Postini.

The Reuters report observes that “as Christmas approaches, the daily trawl through in-boxes clogged with offers of fake Viagra, loans and sex aids is tipped to take even longer.” Postini has detected a staggering 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June.

According to Spamhaus, an agency that tracks the problem, “About 200 illegal gangs are behind 80 percent of unwanted e-mails.

Reuters: Experts blame the rise in spam on computer programs that hijack millions of home computers to send e-mails. These "zombie networks", also called "botnets", can link 100,000 home computers without their owners' knowledge. They are leased to gangs who use their huge "free" computing power to send millions of e-mails with relative anonymity.

An Assault on Breathing Space

A study conducted by Commtouch indicates that most spam originates from websites hosted in countries outside the U.S. Pharmaceutical drugs are most advertised, with Viagra the leading the way.

The recipients of these largely unwanted messages are nearly all in the U.S. Meanwhile, despite filters and spaminators, the pace of spam is accelerating . The aggregate number of unique spam outbreaks per day has been rising for for more than five years.

Too Much Email of the Wrong Kind

50 billion e-mail messages worldwide are sent each day, equal to seven messages for everyone on the planet, although the vast majority of people are not online. In 2001, e-mail traffic was less than 12 billion.

Of the 50 billion messages sent daily, more than 88% cent of e-mails are spam including about 1 per cent which are virus-infected. So that means at least 44 billion spam messages are sent each day, 365 days a year, and each day 4.4 billion e-mail messages contain viruses. Has junk email become an issue for you? It’s time to arm yourself to the teeth with with spam protection, virus protection, and a private email account.