Quiet before the storm?

By Leon Engelbrecht for Symantec
Johannesburg, 04 Jul 2008

Security vendor Symantec's July spam report suggests the spam scourge has levelled out, with around eight out of every 10 e-mails sent around the world falling into that category.

But Symantec regional director Patrick Evans says it may be the calm before the storm.

"Plateaus like this are always short-lived and we have a big sporting event that's about to come up, the Beijing Olympics. The one thing we saw at the time of the FIFA 2006 World Cup was a 40% increase in phishing attacks. I fully expect there to be plenty of phishing and spam activity around the Olympics.

"Spam has steadily increased as a percentile of e-mails sent. In the middle of last year, it was about 65% of global mail, climbing to 65% of mail in the second half of the year, before spiking to over 80% around Christmas. It briefly receded in January before returning and hugging the 80% median."

Evans says SA is somewhat protected from spam by high broadband costs, meaning the local average for the last three months is between 55% and 65%. But the country and Internet users are by no means safe from the scourge, he adds.

"South African organisations are being targeted by spammers. We must be mindful of that. During a recent denial-of-service attack against a local organisation, they were receiving between one and two million messages an hour, versus the normal million e-mails a day. Ninety-seven percent of this was spam and 100% of those were infected either with a Trojan or a virus.

"The attack was very directed. It targeted that institution only. No-one else in the country was targeted at that time." Evans says the attack meant to swamp the business' Microsoft Exchange server so it would let the infected spam through to end-users and contaminate their systems.

The lower South African spam average is partly the result of high broadband costs, Evans says, which has kept the number of local spammers in check - and partly the result of efforts by Internet service providers (ISPs) to fight the scourge.

"The ISPs are quite good at combating spam. The lower figure is a testament to the ISP community, who leads the battle; in a lot of cases they have risen to the challenge."