Spammers Dumping Porn For Financial Services And Consumer Products To Maintain Profits

Clearswift Spam Index uncovers latest spam trends

London, UK – May 24th 2004: Financial spam is close to overtaking pharmaceutical spam as the most common form of junk email according to the April Clearswift Spam Index, as spammers appear to be abandoning porn for more profitable offerings.

Pornography spam continues to decrease, reaching its lowest level since the inception of the Clearswift Spam index in June 2003. Back in June 2003, it accounted for 22 per cent of all junk email and since has been in decline, accounting for only five per cent of total spam in April 2004.

Healthcare spam dropped from 57 per cent of unsolicited mail in March back to 40 per cent in April, with financial spam growing from 26 per cent in March to 38 per cent of total spam in April. It is the second straight month financial spam has grown – it only accounted for 11 per cent of spam in February.

The other category which saw large increases this month was direct products, which includes spam emails trying to sell products or services (excluding adult services), which grew from under two per cent of spam in March to 23 per cent in April.

Illegal digital cable television filters, which allow cable television subscribers to unlock premium channels which they do not subscribe to, were one of the most popular examples of direct product spam during the month.

“We’ve seen no sign of a let up in the amount of spam traffic so it seems quite clear that the legislative efforts of governments around the world are having little effect on the spammers,” said Alyn Hockey, Clearswift’s Director of Research. “However, from the dwindling amount of pornographic spam email, it appears that adult products and services are not generating sufficient returns for spammers. Instead, they are switching to more profitable models using stock tips and consumer products as a hook.”

The figures, which were extracted from the millions of unsolicited emails received by Clearswift on a weekly basis, are made up of spam generated by seeding email accounts and spam submissions forwarded to Clearswift by its 20 million users.

Clearswift’s MAILsweeper Business Suite 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. 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.

About Clearswift

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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.

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