Symantec Spam Data E-Newsletter - June 2004

Symantec Spam Data E-Newsletter - June 2004

This monthly spam data newsletter from Symantec contains June 2004 spam and email fraud data. Symantec filters more email and spam than any other company, protecting 25 percent of mailboxes worldwide.

Local spammers continue despite new laws In May we reported that spam rates had remained the same for two months in a row for the first time ever; however, a slight rise in the amount of spam hitting our inboxes occurred during June. Up from 64 percent in April and May, June spam rates hit an all time high of 65 percent.

Spam originating from the APAC region has also risen from 0.2 percent in January to 1.8 percent in June. While the percentage may seem low, it adds up when you consider that this equates to more than 1.2 billion email messages.

While the incidence of spam produced locally appears to have increased, most spam hitting Australian and New Zealand inboxes originates from overseas with more than 70 percent of all spam claimed to originate from North America. To help stem the flow of spam, the Australian, US and British governments have agreed to work together to identify spammers and enforce legislation. As widely reported in the media, the US Federal Trade Commission has signed an agreement with business and communication regulators in the UK and Australia to "provide a framework for cooperation in fighting cross-border spam."

Products beat adult to take out most prevalent category honours Although spam rates have increased again, the breakdown of spam categories and the amount of spam they account for in APAC has remained relatively similar to May. The most notable changes were the finance and product categories. Spam in the Finance category increased by two percent while product spam took over from adult as the most prevalent category, accounting for 20 percent of all spam.

Here is a breakdown of the types of spam received in APAC in June:

Products 20% Adult 19% Financial 17% Health 9% Internet 9% Leisure 7% Scams 7% Spiritual 1% Fraud 5% Other 6%

Symantec releases new tools to help organisations combat spam Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam Version 6.0 is the latest instalment of the world's most effective anti-spam software, blocking spam (spam-catching rate of 95%), while assuring legitimate mail is reliably delivered (highest accuracy rate against false positives of 99.9999%).

Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam Version 6.0 gives organisations:

* Increased non-English language capabilities - 11 languages including Asian character-based languages. Up to 20 per cent of all spam is non-English

* MIME attachment filters - stops spam in the form of email attachments

* More URL filters - developed based on URLs seen in the Symantec Brightmail Probe Network, a collection of millions of decoy accounts that are seeded across the Internet to attract spam

* Symantec Brightmail Reputation Service - determines an email source's reputation by leveraging information collected from Symantec Brightmail Probe Network along with the more than 100 billion messages each month that Symantec filters. The service is designed to offer the highest protection rate and lowest margin of error with hourly list updates

* Web-based management console - a cross-platform tool that provides information to email administrators on system status, quarantine, server settings, reports, and logs

For More Information

For additional information on Symantec, visit www.symantec.com. Why trust Symantec's Patented Probe Network for all your data? Symantec sees and stops more unsolicited spam messages than any other anti-spam provider, blocking more than three billion spam messages daily for its customers worldwide. Because Symantec has been fighting spam for the past six years, the company is in a unique position not only to track the volume and profiles of spam messages, but to expose the techniques that spammers use to launch attacks against email users. Symantec Logistics and Operations Centres - in the US, Ireland, Australia and Taiwan - leverage data from the Probe Network and automatically distribute spam-blocking filters to Symantec Brightmail customers every 10 minutes.

Symantec protects more than 300 million mailboxes around the globe with its anti-spam software, including eight of the top 12 ISPs in the US, and three of the largest in Australia/New Zealand, and has access to the most statistically relevant email sample available.

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