Spam levels unlikely to drop anytime soon

SoftScan releases spam and virus statistics for May

London, UK, June 1st 2007 - Spam levels remained relatively unchanged during May, with 88.51% of all email scanned by SoftScan classified as spam. Virus levels dropped slightly to 1.40%. Despite the prominent arrest of Robert Soloway and claims this month that image spam is on the decrease, SoftScan does not believe that spam levels will drop significantly anytime soon.

"Some people are predicting that spam levels will drop with the arrest of the so called ‘Spam King' this week. However, I always think it's a mistake to underestimate a spammer, it's a sure fire way of finding yourself ambushed. Every business has a contingency plan and there is no reason to suspect that spammers are any different," says Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "Although it has been relatively quiet on the spam front for the past eight weeks, a sudden spike that caused a 25% increase at the beginning of the week has shown that the spammers are still out there and mean business."

SoftScan also believes that stories of image spam tactics being replaced by links to picture websites is unlikely to work as a spamming tactic, since a link within an email is actually easier to detect than some of the more complex and sophisticated image spam seen today. Although it does perhaps indicate that image spam is not the success that spammers hoped it would be.

"My guess is that spammers do what they believe is best possible tactic - if image spam was a success they would stick to that," concludes Diego d'Ambra.

The top five virus families in May 07 were:

1 - phishing: 93.49%
2 - small: 2.66%
3 - netsky: 0.81%
4 - stration: 0.78%
5 - mytob: 0.49%