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.
MySpace devotee Kary Rogers was expecting to see a gut-busting video when a friend from the popular online hangout messaged him a link.
First, though, he was directed to a page where he was supposed to re-enter his password.
Rogers realized that someone was trying to steal his information, and he didn't take the bait.
At best, he would be spammed with junk e-mails; worse, the cyber thief might steal his real-life identity.
The holiday season brings festive parties, family gatherings -- and a deluge of spam. Unsolicited messages, or spam, which account for nine out of 10 e-mails, fill up the inboxes of computer users more than ever at this time of year, experts say.
"Every year we see a seasonal increase around the holiday season. It's just worse than it's ever been before this year," said Daniel Druker, executive vice president of marketing at Postini, a company that provides message security services.
MOST internet users already know it: spam is on the rise again as senders of unwanted email find new ways to circumvent filtering systems.
A study released last month by the security firm Postini found that unwanted messages now account for 91 per cent of all email, and over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam rose by 120 per cent.
A separate report by California-based IronPort Systems concluded that worldwide spam volumes increased from 31 billion messages daily in October 2005 to 61 billion messages per day in October 2006.
The UK's privacy watchdog has admitted that it has not successfully prosecuted any UK spammers, despite regulations designed to curb spam being brought in three years ago.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has frequently said it has a lack of power to combat spam, and blames its lack of power on the UK Government. "We have not prosecuted spammers," said an ICO spokesman. "We have limited powers as you know to deal with people who pedal unsolicited marketing emails."
Spammers are trying destabilize global spam-reporting services by flooding them with automated false spam reports, according to an Australian data security specialist. According to anti-spam vendor, TotalBlock, which uses a challenge-response system, the evidence came to light when one of the company's customers was sent a spam email, which TotalBlock?s spam-blocking technique challenged. The original spammer then reported TotalBlock?s challenge to spam reporting service SpamCop as a spam email.
Chinese Internet users received two or three junk e-mails on average each day from June to October, with the fact that almost three in every five e-mails sent in China was junk mail.
Figures from the Internet Society of China (ISC) show China generates about 50 billion junk e-mails annually, accounting for 59.49 percent of the total e-mail volume, or 2.7 junk e-mails per user.
Zeng Mingfa, head of the ISC anti-junk mail center, said the figure was dropping. From February to August, at least 150,000 junk e-mail reports were sent to the center.
Spammers are out in full force getting ready for the festive season according to security company Postini.
The company has seen spam grow by nearly three-fifths over the last three months and said spam, which is increasingly criminal in intent, now accounts for nine in 10 of all emails sent.
Postini's executive vice president of marketing, Daniel Druker, said: "This dramatic rise in spam attacks? has the internet under a state of siege.
Growing numbers of businesses and individuals are complaining that the anti-spam solutions provided by their Internet service providers (ISPs) are letting through far too much junk email, according to Australian data security expert Peter Stewart.
Researchers and IT managers are confirming security vendors' claims that spam levels have spiked in the past month--some say by as much as 80 percent--and show no signs of decreasing.
