Combating Spam

:Combating spam:

The spam menace has been a cause for concern for most organizations. More than half of the world’s e-mails consist of spam, ranging from possibly useful information, through unwanted information to downright offensive or malicious material. These spam mails may include sexually explicit content and can even trigger phishing.

The rise in spam levels is a result of a new generation of viruses and zombies that can infect PCs more quickly and are harder to get rid of. From spam to malware, high-tech opportunists use a multitude of techniques to make a quick buck off the steadily booming number of people surfing the Internet, and the spam menace is growing year on year.

In today’s corporate network, when spam enters a corporate server, it translates into a high cost for the organization. This cost is not just in terms of wastage of storage and bandwidth, but also in terms of the time of resources that employees waste weeding out these unwanted messages, apart from the risk of phishing. Today, spam represents about 90% of all e-mail and according to Websense Security Labs (WSL), 3 in 50 messages led to phishing sites in the month of October 2008, an increase of 240% over the previous month.

According to other industry sources, spam costs businesses around $20.5 billion annually in decreased productivity as well as in technical expenses. The average loss per employee annually because of spam is approximately $1,934.

On a global scale, the estimated cost of spam to the economy is approximately $25 billion per year causing financial costs and losses in productivity for service providers, businesses and end-users alike. To add to it, the format of such spam attacks keeps evolving as spammers keep using newer and more sophisticated techniques and evade existing spam detection applications.

Here we could just say that as the use of e-mail is growing in organizations, so is the spam problem. Spam is significantly reducing the efficiency of e-mail usage as time and money are wasted through the daily routine of ‘check email-detect spam-delete’ actions.