Spam traffic hits record highs as spammers

Spam traffic hits record highs as spammers

go back to work after the summer holidays

The number of spam messages hitting New Zealand email systems has reached record levels, according to Auckland-based anti-spam and virus service provider SMX.

SMX managing director Jesse Ball, says that his company maintains daily statistics of the type and volume of spam messages identified.

“Late last year and early this year saw spam levels hitting record levels, then declining quite sharply. But in June of this year levels started to rise steeply. By early July spam levels surpassed the all time highs of last January and they’re continuing to climb steeply each day,” Jesse Ball says.

“In percentage terms, spam traffic in August this year was 100 percent up on spam traffic in May. That’s a fifty percent increase on the previous record set in January this year.

“This means that last month 78 percent of all messages we cleaned for our customers was spam. Last week this peaked at 81 percent.”

The reason for the increase probably relates to spammers in the Northern Hemisphere returning from their summer holidays. This, says Ball, accounts for the sudden ‘spike’ in volumes. However, the overall trend is fuelled by the fact that spamming works.

“Even though only a tiny percentage of spam messages result in business for the spammers, the volumes of spam messages are so huge and the cost so small for the spammers that the economics stack up. So we can expect to see spam volumes continue to increase.

“This need not be a problem for business users,” Ball says. “Despite these record spam levels, SMX customers have continued to receive emails 99.97 percent clean of spam and 100 percent clean of viruses.”

This, says Ball, is a major endorsement for the SMX approach which is to have customers route their emails through SMX servers before delivery. This way, SMX is able to constantly monitor the flow of spam and constantly tune the filters to beat new spam techniques. SMX provides this as a service, paid for on a per user per month basis, compared to a product-based solution which requires users to regularly update their hardware and software.

About SMX

Launched in February 2006, SMX is a privately-owned secure email software development and services company. The SMX proposition is to clean mail of viruses and spam to 99.97 percent accuracy. The conceptual innovation is to offer this ’99.97 percent clean’ customer outcome as a service, paid for on a monthly per user basis, rather than as a software product installed on a customer’s own system and requiring IT staff to upgrade, maintain and provision. The technology innovations include the unique ability to service multiple customers out of a single system (multi-tenanted). No other service-based solution is so easily scalable, and no other is so fast to deploy – taking literally two or three phone calls and less than half a day to fully deploy across the largest organisation.

Based in Auckland, SMX founders Jesse Ball and Thom Hooker lead a sales and development team focused on local direct sales as well as local and international sales through reseller and licence agreements. A professional Board is headed by chairman John Quirk of IT investment advisors Howard and Company.

Currently SMX has a total of 20,000 users and a rapidly-growing blue chip customer list including the AA, TAB, Sealord, ESR, and RHE and Associates.

ENDS

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