SECURITY
Spam continues to litter Irish inboxes
04-02-2008
by Emmet Ryan
The level of spam in the inboxes of Irish businesses is showing no sign of decreasing, according to new research by IT security firm IE Internet.
The rate of spam targeting Irish inboxes in January was 63.3 percent, according to IE Internet's research; this is similar to the rate recorded by the IT security firm in other surveys it has conducted over the past few months. The figures are based on traffic through 35,000 Irish e-mail accounts.
"The spam problem is certainly not diminishing," said Ken O'Driscoll, chief technical officer with IE Internet. "To put it into context -- in 2004 the rate of spam for the whole year did not exceed 30 percent. In only four years, we have seen a doubling of that rate."
The United States has retained the dubious honour of being top of the spam league table, contributing 43.2 percent of all spam detected in January. Germany came in second with 39.8 percent, a result that surprised IE Internet.
"Our investigation shows the German spam traffic to be a specific off-shore business using rented space in a major German centre as opposed to a German-wide problem," said O'Driscoll. Other significant sources of spam included Poland and France.
The rate of e-mail-based virus threats stayed relatively low at 4.2 percent with the top viruses remaining unchanged over the last number of months.
"It's not that people have stopped writing viruses -- it's just that we as a security community have become so effective at blocking e-mail viruses that attackers are moving away from e-mail and using new methods such as web sites," said O'Driscoll.
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