Unseen Spam Costs Rising

Filed in archive Spam on February 25, 2008

A new study by the European Network and Information Security Agency(ENISA) is reporting that spam is posing an increasing threat to corporate security and bandwith costs. Even though only 6% of all spam ever makes it to actual inboxes, the overall amount is growing.

20% of the world's population now has internet access and broadband access is becoming increasingly accessible. The larger the amount of people who have such access becomes, the faster botnets can spread their malware and spam.

ENISA polled 30 ISPs in 19 countries on how they secure their services and fight spam:

Every provider filtered incoming traffic and more than 90% filtered outgoing traffic, up 15% and 46% respectively from a year ago. On average, providers used five different spam filtering methods.
Almost every provider published contact details for the users to report violations, up from 60%

.
The report also states that providers have become more proactive and have stopped relying on customer complaints to detect spam, but fewer took the time to try and figure out where the spam comes from.