MessageLabs Intelligence: 2006 Annual Security Report from MessageLabs IThound

MessageLabs Intelligence: 2006 Annual Security Report
by MessageLabs
Published:December 2006
Format: Portable Document Format (.pdf)( 728.9 KB )
Length: 17 pages
Overview

One of the key developments in 2006 has been the significant increase in spam activity, with levels now reaching 86.2%, the highest experienced since early 2005. Spam volumes have increased by 70% over the last quarter of 2006, pushing up overall email volumes by a third, largely due to the increased sophistication of robot networks, or “botnets”. The latest techniques mean that mass-mailed viruses used to create these botnets are a thing of the past.

The spam figure shows the rate of spam as it reaches the MessageLabs global infrastructure. The first stage of filtering begins when known spam from known bad sources is slowed-down using traffic management controls in place, allowing more bandwidth to be allocated to known good mail and mail from sources that we are unable to make an unequivocal judgement about. Of the mail which is not affected by these traffic management controls, 63.4% is then filtered by Skeptic™ anti-spam. This includes a proportion of mail that is intended for non-existent recipients at businesses, for example from a directory attack against a particular domain.

It is worth noting that without the traffic management controls in place, MessageLabs would have to filter in excess of 2.36 billion connections each day. 90% of these are immediately and unequivocally identified as spam from known bad sources and are then allocated minimal bandwidth, often causing these connections to slow down and expire.

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