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Email Viruses Reach New Low While Spam Reaches New High

Christopher Vendemio   on 01 June 2006 - 21:04 · 13 comments & 8859 views

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May of 2006 gave us not one, but two new email records. The first record may surprise you a bit. Emails containing malicious programs (viruses) reached an all time low, accounting for a minute 0.73% of total email traffic, according to the figures released by the security firm, BlackSpider Technologies. On the flip side, however, spam mail accounted for 87.4% of email traffic, also setting a new record, albeit not as positive of a record as the first.

There is an explanation behind the abnormally high spam record, though. In the UK, between May 21 and 23, over 250 million spam emails were sent by computers that had previously been infected by a virus. Combine that with the recent controversial shutdown of Blue Security, and we have one huge reminder that the spam problem continues to worsen, seemingly with each day that passes.

News source: VNUNet

Post a comment · Send to friend Comments · There are 13 additional comments
#1 Jaxkesa on 01 Jun 2006 - 21:28
damn you, spam!!
#2 Xavien on 01 Jun 2006 - 21:54
nearly 90% of all email is spam? omg, thats insane.

Luckly i have managed to avoid spam entirely (though it took many attempts, i had 3 emails chock full of spam in the end, i just closed them all down and created a new one)
#3 chicken-royal on 01 Jun 2006 - 22:03
Ouch! 87.4% is a crazy amount. o_O
#4 Ficman on 01 Jun 2006 - 22:34
Ouch
#5 L3thal on 01 Jun 2006 - 22:34
Something has to be done because spam is starting to get as galling as viruses, if not worse.
#6 M2Ys4U on 01 Jun 2006 - 23:23
Give the guys at Okopipi a hand - they're going to do exactly what Blue security did (remove the finacial incentive to spam its userbase), only P2P it so the spammers can't shut it down

http://okopipi.org
http://wiki.okopipi.org/wiki/FAQ
#7 Audhumla on 02 Jun 2006 - 00:29
All that wasted bandwidth...
#8 advancedboy on 02 Jun 2006 - 02:41
Sounds about right... good thing for Gmails spam blocking eh?
(1 reply) #9 McG on 02 Jun 2006 - 10:09
I completely HATE spam. I have over 2,000 unread Hotmail messages in my old hotmail account after not checking it for about a week. That's why I got a Yahoo email--so far, no spam at all...but that's how my hotmail one was...
#9.1 markjensen on 02 Jun 2006 - 13:12
The thing that still sucks about that is that the spam is still out there, consuming time, space and bandwidth on email servers. You have a good filter that prevents the user/client from dealing with it, but it is still a large pollutant.
#10 m-head on 02 Jun 2006 - 13:48
I never get that much spam...ever. I get spam in my gmail spam box, but that takes 3 clicks to remove from inbox to end so it's all good.
(1 reply) #11 xpclient on 02 Jun 2006 - 14:19
Btw Neowin, I cant post comments from IE but can from FF.
#11.1 m-head on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:10
I'm posting from Firefox right now.

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