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Junk E-Mail Reaches Astronomic Levels
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2006-07-27
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Everyone knows that there is a lot of less-than-great e-mail out there. An article released today indicates levels that are shockingly high, though - "95% of e-mail is junk," it proclaims, and most of that isn't from any certain businesses or organizations. "80% of e-mail came from compromised hosts."
Mark Ward of the BBC compiled a report using statistics from several different companies. One disturbing piece of data came from Return Path, which "said 99% of the computers it monitors that send mail have been taken over by spammers or virus writers." Those are pretty terrible odds.
"Return Path reached its estimate by calculating a ‘reputation score' for the 20 million net addresses of those machines," Ward wrote. Its research led to the belief that "only 1% of net addresses could be regarded as legitimate sources of mail . . . . The rest . . . were hijacked computers, or bots, used by spammers and other net criminals to send e-mail."
Another company had different, but still discouraging, information to offer. "IronPort, which monitors about a quarter of all mail sent across the net, said its research revealed that about 80% of e-mail came from compromised hosts," said Ward.
Matt Peachey of IronPort offered Ward a breakdown of the e-mail that was not legitimate. "70% were spam, 11% were bounces or error messages and 9% was viruses . . . . Only about 10% of e-mail was now real."
Ward also included numbers from Sophos. 23.2% of spam originates in the good old U.S. of A., apparently, making us the world leader in that respect. China was second, at 20%, and South Korea and France followed with 7.5% and 5.2%, respectively.
That's an impressive amount of research, and a daunting picture that it paints.
Junk e-mail
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About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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