A close look at the data provides a clear picture of how spammers vary their tactics to overwhelm traditional corporate email defenses, through changes in duration, frequency and intensity among others. This whitepaper will help you understand these threats to your business, and how MessageLabs provides a unique solution.
WHITE PAPER
Spam Spikes:
A Real Risk to Your BusinessDan Bleaken, Internet Data Analyst, MessageLabs
Spam: The Uninvited Guest Take a look at the following graph, which presents daily traf? c Everyone hates spam. It's the enemy of good business. data compiled by MessageLabs for a sample of ? ve email Whenever your organization receives an unsolicited email, your domains, from September 2006 to August 2007: ef? ciency, productivity and pro? tability take a hit. Spam doesn't just soak up staff time. It's also an unwelcome drain on your computing resources. Valuable mail server capacity is wasted processing unwanted emails and delivering them to reluctant recipients.
What's more, this is one uninvited guest that won't go away. Spam currently accounts for around 70% of emails heading to corporate gateways. Overall volumes are rising too, and with spammers getting more skilled at targeting speci? c sectors and individual organizations, the threat to your business is very real - and growing. .Many businesses that have invested heavily in anti-spam defenses, especially in-house appliance-based or software-based The blue line shows the overall upward trend in emails received. systems, regularly ? nd themselves suffering from spam. Most With legitimate email traf? c remaining fairly constant, this trend commonly, a sudden surge in spam appears and causes real was almost entirely due to an increase in unsolicited emails. disruption - plus a major headache for IT administrators. Then What makes this particularly worrying is the fact that "spamming the surge stops. Normality returns - until the next surge comes season" is about to start - and from a much higher base than in along and the whole business-compromising cycle starts again. 2006, as the graph shows. This time of year traditionally sees companies suffering huge spam surges as spammers try to cash So what lies behind these surges? Why can't conventional anti- in on increased consumer spending in the run-up to Christmas. spam defenses cope, and what tactics are spammers adopting MessageLabs expects this year to be no exception to the rule.to achieve their objectives? Most importantly, what can you do to comprehensively and cost-effectively protect your business But even more noticeable than the blue line are the large red against spam? "spikes" in September to October and the particularly dramatic ones between November 2006 and March 2007. The information presented in this MessageLabs White Paper is based on our hands-on experience of providing proven These spikes represent days on which spam activity was very messaging and web security management services for over high. The steady growth in overall email traf? c from April to 16,000 clients worldwide, with around 1.5 billion emails August 2007 was also largely due to increasing levels of spam. processed each week on their behalf. Indeed, across the year as a whole, domains received a huge variety of spam from a vast number of spammers located all Traf? c and Trends over the world. Arriving in formats such as plain text, HTML text, Close analysis of email traf? c data reveals why conventional images (e.g. .jpeg or .gif) and PDF documents, the types of spam anti-spam defenses are struggling to combat spammers' included, for example:current tactics. - spam selling pharmacy products (e.g. Viagra), software, watches, etc;
WHITE PAPER: Spam Spikes: A Real Risk to Your BusinessA sudden surge - "advanced fee fraud" spam; cope with. But the sheer volume of emails within a - "phishing" spam aimed at gathering personal big spike simply overwhelms mail servers running in spam appears information; anywhere near maximum capacity. Severe disruption and causes real - casino/betting spam; inevitably results, with anti-spam defenses rendered - dating/sexual spam useless. disruption. Even more noticeable But what do individual spam spikes in the daily During one recent spike, the email traf? c of an data actually represent? A single spam attack? engineering company monitored by MessageLabs are the dramatic Or a number of distinct attacks taking place close experienced a 900% increase in overall email spam 'spikes'. together? To ? nd out, we must drill further down volumes, averaged over a 24-hour period in which into the data. their domain was targeted by spammers. A... [download for more]
