Filtering under siege as spam tide rises

When Australians return from the holidays, around 95 per cent of email directed at their personal and business in-boxes will be spam, according to data security expert Peter Stewart. And global anti-spam solution vendors confirm that spam volumes rose between 100 per cent and 120 per cent during 2006 with worse to come this year. They attribute to rise to the spammers extensive use of botnets hijacked computers the criminals use to generate huge volumes of spam - and to the increasingly sophisticated methods criminals are using to elude the filtering technology that most anti-spam solutions employ to control spam. The global scourge of spam continues to worsen, and the industry suggests this discouraging trend will continue in 2007, said Stewart, Chairman of TotalBlock Pty Ltd.