The problem of spam continues to be a major annoyance for many. Over the past two years the amount of spam has increased. According to Postini, a communications security firm they blocked more than 25 million spam messages in December. This was a 144 percent increase from December 2005 to December 2006.
“This continued rise in spam levels is threatening the viability of e-mail for businesses that are not properly protected, and is sapping the productivity of hundreds of millions of workers around the world,” said Daniel Druker of Postini. “Just fifteen minutes per day dealing with the increased volume of spam can cost companies $3,200 per employee per year, which adds up to tens of billions of dollars of lost productivity around the world.”
Most of the increased volume of spam in 2007 will come from bot-nets. These are networks of personal computers that spammers use to flood the Internet with spam and viruses. Bot-nets enable spammers to send an unlimited amount of spam for free by using millions of infected personal computers and network connections to send the unwanted messages.
Postini predicts there will be an increase in spam in 2007. Because of globalization more personal computers with high-speed Internet connections could be prime targets for spammers.
In December hackers released a large social-engineering based email virus known as the Happy New Year worm. The massive attack increased the daily volume of email viruses on the Internet by a factor of twenty on New Year’s weekend.
The top five viruses for December according to Postni were nuwar, netsky, stration.gen, downloader and mytob.
Add to 
Mike is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
