Spam Reached 96 Percent Of Email in Q4, 2007

Global spam levels measured by Commtouch swelled through the fourth quarter of 2007, hitting a high of 96 percent of all email in October 2007.

While we can’t speak for the rest of the Internet, we do see the inbox sift out roughly six good messages out of 300 at any given time at SecurityProNews.

That puts us in the neighborhood email security vendor Commtouch observed. Global spam levels measured by the company for the year hit an astonishing peak of 96 percent.

Astonishing unless one is sitting in the lead-lined writing room at our international HQ, watching the wonderful SpamBayes plug-in go to work on an inbox freshly opened in the morning. Commtouch said on their blog they “monitor unfiltered data streams of Internet email traffic, not including internal corporate traffic. This open traffic is analyzed to find the ratio of spam to legitimate email messages.”

The cruft collecting in inboxes, unless one has a product cleaning it on a continual basis, can contain any number of unwanted pests. Minor annoyances like plaintext stock-pumping emails pale in comparison to the malware-linked spam leading to infections and possible takeover by a remote server.

Those takeovers tend to connect a victimized PC to a broad network of other corrupted machines. These devices function as a botnet, which increasingly in these times provide outlets for the distribution of the Storm worm, a ferociously prolific pest that could be on millions of computers worldwide.

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Sunbelt, Dell Unsheathe Ninja Blade

An email security appliance from Sunbelt debuted on Dell’s PowerEdge server line; the device takes the spam fight to the gateway and off the desktop.

We have held the opinion for some time that the email security fight should not be waged on the desktops of people, whether a single at-home individual or a multinational corporation with thousands of email users.

Various purveyors of security solutions think the same way. Slam the door shut on spam, phishing, and malware link-bearing messages at the gateway, rather than worrying about someone clicking on something they should not in the email client.

Sunbelt Software and Dell paired on one such gateway approach. Their newly released Ninja Blade device incorporates antispam technology from Cloudmark, and antivirus from BitDefender to complement the Message Transfer Agent on-board.

Sunbelt also noted Ninja Blade works real-time with Active Directory and LDAP, which will speed up the initial configuration and deployment period needed to place it in service in those environments.

The launch puts Sunbelt in direct competition with one of the bigger fish in the email security appliance market, that being Barracuda Networks. Sunbelt CEO Alex Eckelberry said in a statement Ninja Blade would have a competitive price point; the four Ninja Blade products start at $1,995, plus support and maintenance plans.

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