'Tumultuous year' for spam levels

2009-12-10

It has been something of a tumultuous year when it comes to spam activity in 2009, research has indicated.

This may be a concern for those firms hoping to prevent an IT intrusion, as Symantec 's MessageLabs Intelligence 2009 Security Report revealed that average spam levels reached 87.7 per cent, while hitting a high of 90.4 per cent in May and a low of 73.3 per cent in February.

Compromised computers were found to have issued 83.4 per cent of the 107 billion spam messages distributed globally per day on average.

Symantec has predicted that in 2010, botnets will become "autonomous intelligent", each node having its own inbuilt self-sufficient coding so that they can coordinate and prolong their survival.

As for other trends seen this year, the organisation found that the average number of new malicious websites blocked each day rose to 2,465, in comparison to 2,290 for 2008.

Meanwhile, the number of phishing attacks stood at 1 in 325.2 emails, with over 161 billion phishing attacks in circulation this year.

Paul Wood, MessageLabs intelligence senior analyst at Symantec, commented: "2009 was the year that the threat landscape sharpened its skills, rather than just relying on large spam runs and malware attacks. We intercepted more variants with increased sophistication, efficiency as well as improvements in technology."

He pointed out that the company stopped over 21 million different kinds of spam campaign this year, which was more than twice the amount seen in 2008. The firm also saw a 23 per cent rise in malware variants year-on-year, he said.

"The significant increases suggest that, thanks to the increased availability of specialised criminal toolkits, it was easier to create, distribute and use spam and malware than ever before," Mr Wood added.

Imperva recently announced its own projections for next year, suggesting that there will be an industrialisation of hacking.

Roles will be defined in the hacking community to form a supply chain similar to that of drug cartels.

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