SoftScan has found that with spam levels reaching 97 per cent and viruses accounting for around 0.1 per cent, less than 3 per cent of all email scanned in December was legitimate. Despite several high profile arrests and successful court cases throughout the year, it seems as if the spammers still have the upper-hand over law enforcement at least.

"Once again the rapid increase of spam throughout 2007 demonstrates that there is not enough deterrent for spammers to give up their highly lucrative enterprise," says Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "Usually, when you look through our monthly statistics, you can quickly identify the weekends or major public holidays when there is less legitimate business email sent as the spam levels jump-up. In December however, except for some slightly lower levels in the first week, spam has remained consistently high throughout the month."

Although the extreme sustained level of spamming could be attributed to less legitimate email being sent because so many people take time off work during December, SoftScan believes that this is unlikely as the company has not noticed this trend before either in December or in the summer holiday months.

The top five virus families in December 07 were:

1. phishing - 87.5 per cent
   
2. dropper - 4.8 per cent
   
3. agent - 2.2 per cent
   
4. netsky - 1.2 per cent
   
5. downloader - 0.9 per cent

Related links: (Open in a new window.)
www.softscan.co.uk

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