Spam traffic soars by 40 per cent
Spam traffic is up by 40 per cent, new figures suggest.
Email management firm Email Systems estimates that around 90 per cent of all email is now junk and claims that firms are struggling to cope with the amount of spam they receive.
Research by the company found that virus mail accounts for just over 15 per cent of all email traffic. According to Email Systems, virus traffic has slowed down but denial of service attacks are on the increase, in which websites are bombarded by requests for information and rendered inaccessible.
The company found that smaller firms are increasingly suffering from denial of service attacks and revealed that a small UK-based engineering firm received a staggering 12 million emails in January, BBC News Online reports.
Email Systems claims that the type of spam being sent has changed over the last few months, with half of spam received since Christmas relating to health and gambling and porn also on the increase. Scam mails have declined by 40 per cent.
Neil Hammerton, managing director of Email Systems, said: "January is clearly a month when consumers are less motivated to purchase financial products or put money into dubious financial opportunities.
"Spammers seem to have adapted their output to reflect this, focussing instead on medically motivated and pornographic offers, presumably intentionally intended to coincide with what is traditionally considered to be the bleakest month in the calendar."
2 February 2005
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