January's spam and virus statistics from SoftScan

London, UK (1^st February 2008) - SoftScan announced today that spam levels have dropped back marginally from their December high to account for 96.8% of all email scanned during January. Although some of the reduction is undoubtedly due to bot infected machines being replaced with new, "clean" computers at Christmas, SoftScan does not believe that the remaining drop is significant, more a lull before the next surge of spam.

"There is nothing to indicate that this reduction in spamming activity is long term," says Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "Either the spammers are content with the data they have collected so far and don't see the need for sending large waves of spam or they are busy working on new tactics. Although we don't expect to see a return to December's levels just yet, I'm sure it will only be a matter of months."

Last month saw the highest rate of spam to date when over 97.02% of email was classified by SoftScan as spam. December was marked by very high levels of spam during weekdays, which has noticeable dropped during January. However, with Valentine's day falling on a Thursday this month, SoftScan expect to see a marked increase in spamming and possible virus activity into the run up of this widely celebrated date.

By comparison virus levels remained very low in January accounting for just 0.11% of all email scanned. The top five virus families in January 08 were:

1 - phishing: 84.88%
2 - dropper: 7.02%
3 - agent: 1.39%
4 - trojan-small: 1.24%
5 - netsky: 0.86%