90 percent of email is spam, reports Symantec

It seems that spammers have put down the foot on the accelerator, considering the report revealed by Symantec. Symantec reports that 90 percent or 90.4 percent (to be exact) of emails on corporate networks happens to be spam. This shows an increase of 5.1 percent compared to last month. But this sort of rise is not of significance, when you consider the fact that on average spam percentage lies within the 80 – 90 domain.

One fact to bear in mind is that around 58 percent of spam messages are generated from s0-called botnets. Botnets can be considered as networks of hacked computer which criminals misuse to do all sort of illegal activities. Donbot, which is considered as the worst spamming botnets generates 18.2 percent of all spam messages.

But botnets are not the only source of spam, as Adam O’Donnell, a researcher with antispam vendor Cloudmark, says

Some of the larger ISPs are seeing a lot of non-bot-driven spam. With these campaigns, the spammer will rent legitimate network services, often in an Eastern European country such as Romania, and then blast a large amount of spam at a particular ISP’s network. The idea is to push as many messages as possible onto the network before any kind of filtering software detects the incident. Spammers are sending hundreds of thousands of messages per day using this technique

Similarly, Facebook is also seen as a tool that might interest the spammers. The recent phishing attack on Facebook is an example of it. What the spammers are doing is that they are stealing user accounts and passwords via different phishing attacks.

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