Spam volume on the rise globally!

Spammers have been majorly ramping up their efforts over the past few months.  Our anti-spam solution provider, Postini (www.postini.com), released a recent sobering report on the recent spike in spam activity … for reference Postini is used by 35,000 businesses protecting 9.1 Million email accounts!

                Spam Skyrockets 59 Percent September to November; 91 Percent of All Email is Now Spam

·         Postini processed nearly 70 billion email connections from September to November, and saw a 59 percent spike in spam over that period. Unwanted email is currently 91 percent of all email, and over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam rose by 120 percent.  Read the full press release at http://postini.com/news_events/pr/pr110606.php

Check out these global spam stats from Postini ...

Tasty SPAM stats for GCC

We have 135 active email accounts on our Exchange email server

In the past 42 days…

·         225,000 email messages were attempted to gccwired.com email addresses … totaling 3.4GB of data

·         That’s 5357 messages per day

·         BOGUS account attempts

·         84,000 (37%) of the 225,000 attempted emails were sent to bogus gccwired.com email addresses … and thus denied.  Although they are certainly spam emails, I’ve not included them in the spam stats below as they do not speak to the effectiveness of our anti-spam solution.

·         LEGIT messages – messages actually making it into your inbox (some of these may still end up in your ‘Junk E-mail’ folder)

·         29,000 (20%) of all incoming messages were passed as legit!

·         That’s 690 messages a day being delivered to our inboxes.

·         Legit messages totaled 2.71GB … 63.8% of incoming data

·         I have no stats on how many of these messages ended up in your Junk E-mail folder

·         SPAM messages

·         112,000 (80%) of incoming messages were flagged as spam!!!

·         That’s 2,700 messages per day being flagged as spam by Postini

·         95,000 (88%) of those flagged were just flat deleted by Postini as “Blatant” spam

·         17,000 (12%) were placed into quarantine as probable spam and thus showed up in your daily quarantine summaries

If you include the bogus emails in our spam count the stats rise to 87% of incoming gccwired.com emails are spam!  Crazy!!  2 thumbs way up for Postini ... it rocks!  Review I did long ago here.  A year and a half later it's one of the best technologies we've ever implemented at GCC.

Messages	Bytes	Accepted (Acct) Msgs	Legit Acct Msgs	% of Msgs	% of Bytes	Blocked Acct Msgs	% of Msgs	% of Bytes	Quarantined Acct Msgs	% of Msgs	% of Bytes
224,942	3,396,334,566	140,818	28,947	20.6	63.8	94,941	67.4	28.8	16,930	12.0	7.4

Comments

[Jason C]

We use the Barracuda products at our church. They keep a world wide reporting of spam as well. Its at http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/resources/spam_central.php

Our own system shows us breaking the 90% spam mark recently as well. We get close to the same amount of email as you do. SCARY!

[Chris McGuffin]

For comparison, here are yesterday's email stats for Sugar Creek Baptist. I believe we are at 102 email accounts.

Total Email Messages Scanned: 6368

Junk Messages Detected: 5130 (80.56% of total)

Virus-Infected Messages Detected: 62 (0.97% of total)

Total Problematic Messages Detected: 5192 (81.53% of total)

[Chris McGuffin]

Jason,

Are you using Postini Corporate or getting it through your ISP?

Chris

[Jason Powell]

Postini Corporate Edition :-)

[Frank]

Strange thing with the recent spam is that an email address that I previously have never gotten spam had suddenly got a huge in flux in the past couple of months.

I am so pissed that somehow my address got out and decided to start tracking websites where they ask for emails to see whether they any one of them is the culprit.

http://www.spamleak.com

I already found a few big privacy leakers and will try to find more. Let me know if anyone has any ideas on making this information really useful.

Thanks.