Spam hitting inboxes at highest rate in two years 4 March, 2007 By Vanessa Ho

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During the last holiday season, the amount of spam people received was only 57 per cent and was 70 per cent from the previous quarter. This dramatic increase surprised Karl Klaessig, product marketing manager of messaging solutions for Ipswitch, a developer of network monitoring, messaging and secure managed file transfer solutions.

"Spammers are constantly trying to figure out ways around the latest and greatest anti-spam and filter technology. They are also working around the clock figuring out ways to target their innovation at the prime time when they can reach the most people and [the holidays] is that time," said Klaessig. He added that the increased adoption of people purchasing online can be blamed for setting the stage for this increased amount of spam in ones e-mail.

Kevin Gillis, director of product management for Ipswitch's messaging solutions, said that historically, when the company did the Spamometer survey, records were always set during the holiday period in terms of the amount of spam received.

"It is possible that every year is the year that it is getting bigger and stronger. 2007 could be worse again," said Gillis.

In terms of what sort of spam made it past a person's filter, 47 per cent comprised of finance phishing. During the previous quarter that number was only 19 per cent. Klaessig believed that this increase can be attributed to the news of the recent arrest of a Russian online crime syndicate whose sole purpose was to design phishing scams to steal people's personal information.

"They were organized and proficient and overnight they put out volumes of phishing scams. They set a precedent, made an incredible amount of money and gave a proven model that [finance phishing] could work that spammers will go after," he added.

Last quarter's spam leader, medication, dropped to number two making up 27 per cent of spam received. A new entry, fake watches, entered in at the number three spot making up seven per cent of all spam received. Pornography was one category of spam that saw a decrease during this period and Gillis said that is due to increased legislation and law enforcement around sending out this sort of spam.

As for tips on how to prevent spam from reaching ones inbox, Gillis said that companies and users can try a technique called honey potting, where one creates a fake address and anyone that hits it is probably a spammer. With this address, users would block those e-mails and then send it right back to the spammer making it more painful for them to send spam as it clogs up their bandwidth. As well, he said that prudence and common sense should prevail.

"Don't randomly send up for online forms or online newsletter with e-mail addresses you don't want to be getting spam from," he advised. As well, Gillis said that people shouldn't unsubscribe to e-mail lists as it will just confirm to a spammer that ones e-mail address is live. Klaessig also offered that users should immediately block any e-mails they don't recognize as spam.

In terms of next year's results, Gillis personally predicts that he expects that finance phishing scams to only increase, especially in the realm of mortgages and loan spams.