Spam level *declines*... to 97 percent of all email

[kwame k]

If you think you're getting a lot of spam these days, well, that's because you are. In Microsoft's latest biannual report on the state of computer security, the company says that in the second half of 2008, a full 97.3 percent of email traffic was unwanted spam (or malicious email like phishing attacks and outright viruses). Surprisingly though, that's down a bit from the first half of last year, when total spam volume reached a whopping 98.4 percent of all email sent.

The latest report (which covers security through the end of 2008, so Conficker isn't part of the package) is available for download here. (Be warned: The full report is 184 pages long. Consider checking out the smaller highlight report instead.)

The good news: Spam filters are getting better than ever. Microsoft's filter system for Exchange now scrubs out 39 out of every 40 emails sent. Spam also saw that slight decline thanks to the shut down last year of the ISP McColo, a major haven for spammers who suddenly had to go shopping elsewhere.

What are we being spammed about? Pharmacy and other product ads make up the lion's share of spam, accounting for 72.2 percent of all spam sent. Only 10 percent of the total spam share now involves sexually-oriented pharmaceuticals; that's a huge decline from previous studies, as apparently Viagra and Cialis are no longer that hard to come by.

Image-only spam, dating come-ons, financial spam, and fraudulent diplomas round out the remainder of the most common spam subjects.

Alternate statistics show the total spam level at lower -- one source pegs it at a mere 81 percent of mail traffic (a figure which seems awfully low) -- and also notes that even with the taking down of McColo and other spammer ISPs, spam traffic will inevitably rise again to "normal" levels.

In the related world of malware infections, the Microsoft report noted that worldwide, 8.6 machines were suffering from malware for every 1,000 which were clean. That sounds pretty good, but it still translates to about 9 million computers worldwide suffering from malware attacks.

What do you need to watch out for today, attack-wise? The most common attacks at the moment target Microsoft Office and PDF files, and those types of attacks are further on the rise.

Link (http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/137384)

[kwame k]

97% of all the world's email is spam? WTF!

[Coyote]

Un-fuckin'-real...

[kwame k]

I'm telling ya, that means only 3 % of all emails are legit.

[Seshmeister]

Good call!

And people mock the intelligence of drummers....

[Seshmeister]

:) :) :)

[kwame k]

Good call!

And people mock the intelligence of drummers....

Just you and Lounge laugh at us drummers but..........you're guitarists, so you guys don't count.

[Seshmeister]

We can count and without our lips moving too! :)

[kwame k]

My previous blog post on the hidden costs of computing -- which pointed to a study that said that leaving computers on overnight wasted $2.8 billion of electricity a year -- was hotly contested by readers, many of whom felt the time spent rebooting their computer every morning was a far greater waste of money.

That remains open for debate, but here's a statistic that I think everyone can get behind: Spam wastes even more electricity than leaving your computer running 24/7, costing roughly $3 billion a year in wasted power alone.

McAfee calculated that sending, routing, and otherwise dealing with spam eats up a total of 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. As The Guardian notes, that's enough to power 2.4 million American homes and, by my math (as the average kw-hr costs about a dime), a total cost of over $3 billion.

And that doesn't even take into account money spent on spam filtering software, the loss of productivity due to users spending time deleting spam messages and finding false positives, and losses from people who get caught up in spam-based scams, either purchasing useless or undelivered products or being the victims of a spam-based crime.

The additional insights in McAfee's Carbon Footprint of Spam Report (registration required) suggest that spam transmission creates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gasoline each year. That's shocking.

But all is not lost: The good news is that McAfee notes that current levels of spam filtering save 135 billion killowatt-hours of electricity that would otherwise be wasted if all users and computers went unprotected from spam.
Link (http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/139377)