Can spam get worse?

Or is it at the saturation point?

The SANS Institute (acronym = SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) web site carried a blog piece that gives a good snapshot of the horrible ongoing plague of spam email that IT folks all over the globe must deal with. The writer, Deborah Hale, said the ISP in the Midwest where she works received almost 20 million pieces of email for more than 9,000 accounts since the beginning of March. Only 713,222 (3.6 percent) were NOT spam.

The comments that follow her blog piece also give other readers’ on-the-ground experiences with spam filtering.

SANS is a “cooperative research and education organization” which has been around since 1989. It’s a great resource.

Deborah Hale blog piece here.

The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA)
2009 spam survey (published in January) found 95 percent of traffic was spam and the situation hadn’t changed much in the year.

Message Labs has estimated that the top 10 botnets are responsible for over 90 percent of spam.