English software company SoftScan issued this press release recently:
London, UK (31st October 2006) – SoftScan announced today that spam levels have risen sharply in the past month to 88.63%, reaching highs last seen in July. Unlike the summer months though, which bring about misleading statistics as the amount of legitimate email actually drops, SoftScan warns this rise is all due to additional spam.
In July, SoftScan reported that spam levels went as high as 95.95% on one day, in October they reached a record breaking 96%. Although these highs are seen at weekends when there is less business mail, the trend over the entire month has been much higher than seen in the last couple of months. Whether it is set to continue remains to be seen.
“This is bad news,” says Diego d’Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. “The spam highs normally seen in the summer are bought about by the low levels of normal business email as many people are away from work taking their summer holiday. This time levels of legitimate email have stayed the same and instead the spike is purely due to a marked increase of over three percent in spam.”
Virus levels have remained low during October accounting for just 0.41% of email scanned by SoftScan, with phishing still remaining the predominant threat. The continuing release of new stration variants has pushed it into the top 5 families and the Trojan small is also prevalent at this time with its three prong attack method of entering an unprotected PC either through an Internet download, as a spammed message or being hidden within other malware.
Top 5 virus families in October were:
- phishing: 66.40%
- small: 10.04%
- stration: 8.57%
- netsky: 4.22%
- downloader: 2.80%
