Spam Volume Continues to Climb, Says Report

The Proofpoint Attack Response Center (PARC) has seen enterprise spam volumes rise by more than 50 percent during the first quarter of 2008 accompanied by short-term spikes of 60 percent or more. PARC's observations measure the volume of spam targeted to enterprises worldwide and represent an average increase across enterprises. Some enterprises have seen spam volume increases as high as 200 percent in Q1 2008. Based on these trends, Proofpoint anticipates that enterprises will see inbound e-mail spam volume more than double this year, continuing the trend of the last two years.

The high volumes of e-mail associated with today's spam attacks can escalate the number of inbound messages between 500 percent and 700 percent within a period of hours. This sudden, exponential growth in spam volumes can easily strain IT network infrastructure to the point of failure.

"Botnets continue to proliferate and are by far the dominant source of spam," said Andres Kohn, vice president of product management for Proofpoint. "The Storm botnet, already the largest network of compromised machines in history, doubled in size during the 2007 holiday season alone. Other botnets such as Mega-D, emulate Storm in technical sophistication and may already surpass Storm as the largest generators of spam. The massive computing power and network resources associated with these botnets allow spammers and scammers to constantly increase the aggressiveness and scale of their attacks."

Kohn added that the large numbers of new Internet users coming online across the world are fueling the growth of botnets. "Many of these users are not savvy to modern social engineering techniques and also have limited access to virus protection," he said. "This makes them easy targets for malware designed to seize control of their computers. We expect this trend, and the commensurate trends in botnet and spam growth, to continue through 2008 and beyond."

"Enterprises today need to prepare themselves for two trends that will continue for the foreseeable future: rising spam volume and sudden, unpredictable short spikes in spam volume," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "This means enterprises not only need highly effective anti-spam technology, but also effective capacity strategies that can accommodate sudden wild fluctuations in volume. Most companies today have the former, but not the latter, and are encountering problems."

Proofpoint's messaging security experts recommend that enterprises deploy both a combination of connection-level protection combined with highly accurate content analysis features to combat growing spam volume.