Kapersky has just released their spam report for 2009 and it details some very interesting stats.  According to Kaspersky, the US has produced more spam than any other country with 16% of spam originating here.  The top spam topics include messages marketing medicine and education.  While some other countries have seen a decrease in spam over time in 2009, the US saw a major increase.  Below is a graph provided in Kaspersky’s report. 

ProSpam can help protect you and your business from these attacks.  Don’t just take our word for it, try ProSpam free for 45 days and see it work for yourself.

 

There’s a new social networking tool in the world from Google named Buzz.  Whether we need another social network or not is not the concern, however the risk of Google Buzz just being another portal for spam is.  Google Buzz is tightly woven inside of gmail.  Google positively markets Buzz as an easy way to integrate comments with people in your address list, Twitter posts, and rss feeds from Google Reader.

Spammers are already utilizing these back doors into your email account.  Google Reader holds a lot of spam.  All it takes is one person you know to share a story with you and through Buzz, this spam story has found a nice cozy home in your email.  Google claims there are 160,000 posts per hour, but how many of these posts are spam?  According to Websense there is already a spammer on Buzz who is following 237 people sending spam about quiting smoking.  As you can see, fighting spam is a constant battle.  

Keep yourself informed and protected.  Keep fighting and blocking spam.  Let us help by offering you ProSpam email filter free for 30 days.

You might be wondering why you get so much spam, and you’d like to block it.   One likely cause for some of it is if you FORWARD jokes, political information, or other similar widely-distributed emails without hiding the TO and FROM addresses before you send it off.   If you forward messages this way (in the open), and the people you send them to also forward them that way, you are multiplying the list of valuable addresses contained in each message and providing a real gift to any spammer who gets it.

For normal business or personal emails, you want the recipients to know who else is seeing the information, so this protection isn’t necessary.   But when you are sending anything that might be re-forwarded to a larger audience, do yourself and others a favor by taking two simple steps before hitting SEND:

1. Type the forwarding addresses into the BCC (blind carbon copy) section, not in the TO or CC section.  This means that the receiver (and all future receivers of his forwards) will not see any of those addresses, so they can’t be harvested for spammer purposes.
2. Page down into the  body of the email and delete any visible email addresses.   This could take a few minutes, but remember that you are protecting those people’s privacy and fighting against the spammers.

That’s it – you should feel good when you send clean forwards, but remember that your address will still be visible to the receivers in the FROM section.   To protect yourself, share this with the family and friends that you normally forward things to and ask them to clean their forwards, too.

When you forward emails you may be supporting a GREAT cause or sending a HILARIOUS joke, but you might also be helping the spammers get rich!  Block Spam – Fight Spam – Let’s not make it easy for them!

According to Matthew DeCarlo at TechSpot.com, Symantec has recently recorded that a “whopping 87.4% of this year’s email messages were spam.” This is definitely a large number, and probably prompted an “I can believe that” type of response from you. However, for the sake of comparison, we decided to do a little stat work of our own to see what kind of spam is going through our server level ProSpam email filter.

Looking at Monday’s report, 12,530 messages were scanned. Out of those, 9,888 emails were flagged as spam and bounced back to the sender. This means that 79% of e-mails sent through the filter were marked as spam. For the benefit of the doubt, we’ll up the percentage a couple of points to account for spam emails that weren’t flagged as spam. So at 81% of email messages going through our system marked as spam, that’s pretty close to Symantec’s findings.

Just a little food for thought: out of the 9,888 emails flagged as spam through ProSpam, 23 malware viruses were found. Going beyond the danger of spoofing, fraudulent link, and enlargement emails, viruses are dangerous business. It’s important to have a good server-level spam filtering solution that will stop this stuff before it even touches your computer. Our ProSpam filter does this, so check it out FREE for 45 days and keep yourself protected.