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| Commtouch Spam Report: 2006 Year of the Zombies Commtouch has released its 2006 Spam Trends Report: Year of the Zombies based on real-time analysis of more than two billion messages globally each week. Highlights include: - Zombies have spread to all geographies, reaching 8 million hosts on a given day; - Spam level soared 30% in 2006 compared with one year ago, due to extensive use of zombies; - Zombie activity accounts for 85% of the spam circulating the Internet; - Remotely-controlled armies of zombies (botnets) can send up to 1 billion messages in just few hours; - Global spam rate: 45% - 98% varying by target audience, with a global average of 87%; - Colossal multi-wave image-spam outbreaks have brought spam bloat to 1.7 billion MB per day; - Ebay and Paypal remain top targets for fraud, together accounting for 50% of all phishing attempts. "Spam outbreaks got bigger, faster and smarter during 2006", points out Amir Lev, Commtouch President and CTO. "Innovative spammers quickly developed new techniques to bypass common anti-spam technologies and amassed huge zombie botnets. Outbreaks have become so fast, massive and sophisticated that most anti-spam solutions had great difficulty defending against them." Internet spammers in 2006 made use of globally distributed botnets of compromised zombie computers, all over the world. Botnet armies containing as many as 200,000 zombies sprang up as they sought out weakly protected computers with fast Internet connections, primarily home broadband users. Commtouch labs estimate that there are 6-8 million zombie IP addresses active on any given day. Compromised zombie machines come in and out of circulation constantly; approximately 500,000 new PCs are captured into zombies botnets each day. A typical botnet can send 160 million spam emails in just two hours. More Spam or Just Less Detection? No matter how you count it; spam is on the rise. With the help of massive zombie armies the overall rate of spam sent globally across the Internet reached 87% at the end of 2006, up 30% from this time last year. However, spam rates vary dramatically for different types of users and organizations, and even within organizations. Some small enterprises enjoy spam rates as low as 45%. High profile free email providers get pummeled with spam rates as high as 98%. Typically, business email accounts receive a smaller percentage of spam than their consumer counterparts. However, business email increasingly became the target of spam last year, registering a 50% increase year over year. "People felt the flood of spam more intensively in 2006 since many anti-spam technologies have not been able to keep up with the spammers' ever-growing bag of tricks", Lev said. "As a result of seeing more spam in their inboxes, end-users' awareness of the spam problem is becoming increasingly acute, and they are demanding solutions that block the vast majority of spam with a minimum of false positives." Inboxes, networks flooded in 2006 as spam blocking rates crashed After years of declining detection, traditional anti-spam methods such as content filtering, heuristics and IP blacklisting were finally overcome by sophisticated new spam techniques. Spammers easily out-maneuvered rudimentary IP blacklists with massively distributed botnets, and put enormous amounts of hijacked computing power at their fingertips. New techniques using images and randomization helped messages slip by conventional anti-spam solutions. Image-spam was particularly damaging in 2006 as its large files accounted for 70% of spam bandwidth bulge, taxing networks heavily. This huge volume increase has prompted demand for on-session blocking solutions that can stop spam at the network perimeter before it wreaks havoc on costly internal IT resources. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Computing News :: home page |