Spam has gone to the dark side

1st Anniversary of Clearswift Spam Index Highlights Evolution of Spam as Criminal Activity Moves Online

London, UK – July 14th 2004: Clearswift, the MIMEsweeper™ company, today announces the findings of its thirteenth spam index to reveal how spam has evolved over the past twelve months. The overriding trend is the transition of spam from being annoying and indecent to illegal and malicious.

When Clearswift’s spam index began measuring different spam content, it was dominated by an almost even mix of pornography, financial, healthcare and direct product spam. In addition, there were also significant amounts of gambling and scam related spam. As revenues for spammers continued to push the tide of spam higher, it was financial and pharmaceutical spam that rose the most, now making up 69.6% of spam between them, compared to 39.2% this time last year. Pornographic spam has fallen from 21.8% to 4.8% in the same period. Now we are far more likely to receive an offer of cheap Viagra or a low interest rate loan than an invitation to an x-rated site or a special deal on replica J-Lo engagement rings.

This trend is indicative of the growing sophistication of spammers and the move of criminal activity online. In its early days, spam was dominated by the pornographic industry and entrepreneurial salesmen that were quick to realise its potential as a low cost and unregulated marketing medium. However, organised crime gangs have since been moving their operations online and spam provides a virtually invisible channel for this kind of activity. By using spam to direct email users onto disreputable websites, it is possible to conceal their activity from authorities. Spam is now a hotbed for a variety of financial scams, such as web-phishing and ‘pump and dump’ stock tipping, and serves as a black market for illegal goods such as fake pharmaceuticals and counterfeit software.

“Not only does spam cause network congestion and reduce productivity, it is now being used as a channel for a plethora of malicious and illegal activity,” comments Alyn Hockey, director of research at Clearswift.

Organised crime gangs now have access to a significant networks of zombie PCs, mainly home PCs with broadband connections, capable of churning out vast quantities of spam. These networks are now being used as a platform for a variety of crimes such as extortion, using the threat of denial of service attacks, and fraudulent identity theft scams, using web-phishing techniques.

The figures, which were extracted from the millions of unsolicited emails received by Clearswift on a weekly basis from seed accounts and submissions forwarded to Clearswift by its 20 million users.

Clearswift’s MAILsweeper Business Suite II combines comprehensive email content security, learning anti-spam software and remote management functionality, which allows multiple email administrators to investigate quarantined emails remotely via a web-based interface. Its Personal Message Manager feature enables desktop spam management, thus eliminating false positives, and the report centre provides powerful reporting capabilities for monitoring spam activity. This solution enables organisations to protect themselves from fraudulent spam, as well as other email threats such viruses, spyware, pornography, lost productivity, damage to reputation, loss of confidential information and network congestion.

To see the graphical representation of the last year's spam catagories, please click here

About Clearswift

Clearswift simplifies content security.

Our products help organizations enforce best-practice email and web use, ensuring all traffic complies with internal policy and external regulations.

Our range of content filtering solutions makes it easy to deploy, manage and maintain no-compromise email and web security for both inbound and outbound traffic.

Clearswift is the only vendor to offer comprehensive, policy-based content security in all three deployment methods: as software, as an appliance and as a managed service.

All three platforms are designed to take the hassle out of securing internet traffic, with a clear, intuitive management interface; automatic, 'zero-touch' updates; powerful reporting and common-sense policy management.

Twenty years of experience across 17,000 organizations has helped us raise security standards while simplifying security management at the same time.

We've helped many of the world's most successful organizations use the internet with confidence and are committed to staying ahead of the market and helping our customers defend against all emerging threats.

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