20bn Spam Buckling Inboxes
December 2, 2007
Internet users in Britain get 20billion spam e-mails every day - double the amount of junk mail sent a year ago.
Up to 120billion spam messages are sent daily worldwide - that's 20 for each person on the planet - and 49 out of 50 e-mails are junk.
Next year, social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace will become prime sources of personal data for spam gangs, a report claims today.
'2007 marked a turning point for threats,' said Jason Steer of IronPort Systems, which did the research.
'Just when malware seemed to have reached a plateau, new attack techniques have emerged.'
The average computer user spends between five and ten minutes dealing with junk each day and recovering from spam, virus and malware attacks is expensive.
Clean-up costs are estimated at £250 for each infected computer.
What's more, nearly half of businesses do not have a policy for telling customers when their private data may be at risk.
And an estimated 60million people have had their personal data exposed in the past 13 months.
There has been £10billion spent trying to battle useless mail worldwide, the report shows.
This year, malware 'went stealth', according to Mr Steer. Some threats are so complex, they have taken years to research, modify and construct - definitely not the work of bored teenage geeks.'
Attacking programmes are much more sophisticated and less easy to detect than ever before.
Mr Steer added: 'Modern malware borrows characteristics from social networking and collaboration sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
'The newest threats like the Storm trojan are collaborative, adaptive, work between two computers and are intelligent.
'It flies under the radar, living on computers for months or years without detection.
'The attitude of "what I can't see won't hurt me" is no longer valid.'
