The Deadly Duo: Spam and Viruses, November 2003

The spam volume that was lost in October has been found in November. According to measurements from Brightmail’s Probe Network, spam has hit the 56 percent mark — an increase of 16 percent over the previous year when only 40 percent of e-mail was classified as spam.

Brightmail categorized the largest volume of spam to be product-related, while spiritual messages accounted for the smallest portion. The newest category, political spam, has dropped to 3 percent, after peaking at nearly 4 percent in October.

The growing spam problem is generating some extreme solutions. According to a survey of 500 small businesses conducted for Symantec by InsightExpress, 42 percent of respondents indicated that they would consider abandoning e-mail for business correspondence if the spam situation worsened, and 55 percent reportedly would consider changing their company e-mail addresses to stop spam. Moreover, 56 percent would consider locking down their e-mail server to allow only approved messages, which would also force all users who wanted to correspond with the company via e-mail to go through an approval process first, and 32 percent of already invest the time and resources to help curb spam by submitting spam e-mail addresses to blacklist companies.

These drastic actions were prompted by the noticeable increase in spam, which 55 percent indicated is draining productivity, 61 percent said was distracting, and 63 percent complained was offensive. More than half (54 percent) reported that spam imposed business costs in the form of user productivity, followed by server and disk storage space (37 percent), and connection time (35 percent).

Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents reported an increase in spam over the past six months, with 33 percent noting dramatic increases. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said that spam made up more than half of the e-mail coming into their businesses.

More than one-quarter (28 percent) of respondents complained that spam contains malicious code, while 23 percent said spam is connected to credit card fraud, and 16 percent reported that it is linked to software piracy.

Steven Sundermeier, vice president of products and services at Central Command, Inc., assessed the month’s virus and malicious threats, finding that the Worm/MiMail family occupied half of the positions on the company’s monthly “Dirty Dozen” list, accounting for 27.2 percent of all confirmed virus occurrences.

“Despite Worm/Gibe.C topping the chart, the Worm/MiMail family dominated the list,” said Sundermeier. “As is the case with Worm/MiMail.I and Worm/MiMail.J, we are beginning to see the emerging pattern of writing computer viruses for financial gain. This increasing trend can have a serious effect on users, beyond the normal risk of computer corruption, by destroying their livelihood. Confidential information such as credit card and bank account information is regularly sought.”

November security research from mi2g indicates that Europe has overtaken North America as the most digitally attacked continent.

“This is a significant shift. Europe has always been second to North America as a target,” said DK Matai, executive chairman, mi2g. “North America, particularly the U.S., has learnt from coming under regular digital fire and is now hardened in comparison to Europe. Many Europeans do not see themselves as legitimate targets because of their perceived neutrality on the world stage. They are mistaken because evidence shows that criminals and malevolents gravitate towards low hanging fruit and attack those easy-to-get opportunities ferociously.”