Spam News

Spam volume doubled since April 1st

Friday, May 22, 2009

The daily spam volume has doubled since April 1st, according to the German email security provider eleven GmbH. The company said Thursday that its security experts noticed a spike in spam traffic beginning May 5th, after a significant ramp-up in the second half of April.

Between April 1st and May 18th, spam grew by 102 percent overall, the company reported. This growth is double the amount of spam as compared to before the McColo server was shut down in November 2008.

"The increase constitutes the highest we have seen during a comparable period in a long time. This proves that the spammers were very successful at rebuilding their infrastructures after McColo incident," said Robert Rothe, founder and CEO of eleven.

After the McColo cutoff, spam volumes worldwide declined by more than 60 percent.

The surge in spam signals a threat to email security - with similar consequences to a DoS attack - and can cause overload and even temporary collapse of email infrastructures, eleven said.

Security experts say SMBs should implement email filtering systems in light of the threat.