March Spam Statistics

Filed in archive Spam News on April 4, 2008

Security vendor Softscan has released its March spam statistics. It found that spam accounted for 96.63% of all email in March, but noticed a sudden 45% drop at the end of the month:

"Although there was a significant drop in spam levels at the reputation filter, we didn't see any drop at our main spam filters," explains Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "This leads us to believe that spammers are cleaning up their infrastructure and are possibly starting to stop sending spam mails that will be automatically picked up by reputation filters anyway. In some respects the drop in spam is good news, but I'm sure it won't be long until the spammers reveal their next tactic to replace the "missing" junk mail."

The company also found that virus levels remained low, accounting for just 0.07% of all emails. The top 5 virus families in March were:

1 - phishing: 77.66%
2 - dropper: 10.96%
3 - ban: 2.83%
4 - diehard: 2.07%
5 - netsky: 1.79%