100,000 spam and malware detected every hour
Spam detection software company Mail-Filters.com reported that last week its servers had detected an average of 103,967 sources of spam or malware per hour being sent to its customers. The company warned, however, that this was only "the tip of the iceberg" and the number of pieces of spam and malware sent were likely much larger.
"Given that the typical number of spammers in any given hour is in the hundreds, we can say that the vast majority of these machines are hijacked. Not only that, this is a one hour snapshot of spammers sending messages to our partners' customers," Ben Westbrook, CEO of Mail-Filters said. "You can easily see that millions of computers continue to be hijacked for the purpose of sending spam and phish."
Westbrook said that the real problem here is not the people sending the spam, it's the infected computers. Once a computer becomes hijacked, it can become a source for spam and malware e-mails. These computers are then "blacklisted" by their IP address, which means legitimate e-mails could end up being inadvertently blocked.
