This massive growth in traffic is the result of spammers no longer distributing a single mail to a large number of recipients, instead preferring to distribute individual spam mails to individual email addresses, each featuring a minute change of some type in an attempt to mark the message as unique and thereby evade detection. One of the current trends amongst virus writers is for their viruses to allow spammers to utilise infected machines to distribute messages on their behalf. Consequently, spammers can now call upon a global arsenal of millions of ‘zombie spam machines’, potentially at the touch of a button.
As a result of the change in strategy, many business email users have been put under tremendous strain in recent months, with those using a network-based means of blocking spam and viruses – ie localised software or hardware – simply unable to cope with the incoming volumes. Although Email Systems customers remain protected as a result of the service being web-based and continued investment in the technology infrastructure behind the service, the company has witnessed many major scale denial of service attacks for businesses of all sizes in recent months.
Neil Hammerton, CEO of Email Systems, commented: “With such an exponential rise in traffic since July this year, it is highly probable that many email users could be looking at a very severe downturn in speed of data provision at the very least if this trend continues at the current pace. Winter 2005/06 was a frenzied period for spam and viruses, with viruses in particular accounting for more than half of all email traffic sent. If that trend occurs again this year then the quantity of viruses distributed will be many times more than has ever been seen previously, simply due to the escalation in volume that has taken place in the last twelve months.
“We are currently experiencing a significant surge in demand for our protection, management and archiving services as many business users look for the best solution to the spam issue. However, all email users need to remain vigilant and ensure that there machine is not infected by a virus or spyware and therefore inadvertently worsening the situation.”
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