Everyone hates spam. It’s the enemy of good business. Whenever your organization receives an unsolicited email, your efficiency, productivity and profitability take a hit. Spam doesn’t just soak up staff time. It’s also an unwelcome drain on your computing resources. Valuable mail server capacity is wasted processing unwanted emails and delivering them to reluctant recipients. What’s more, this is one uninvited guest that won’t go away.
Spam currently accounts for around 70% of emails heading to corporate gateways. Overall volumes are rising too, and with spammers getting more skilled at targeting specific sectors and individual organizations, the threat to your business is very real and growing. Many businesses that have invested heavily in anti-spam defenses, especially in-house appliance-based or software-based systems, regularly find themselves suffering from spam.
Most commonly, a sudden surge in spam appears and causes real disruption – plus a major headache for IT administrators. Then the surge stops. Normality returns – until the next surge comes along and the whole business-compromising cycle starts again. So what lies behind these surges? Why are conventional antispam defenses unable to cope, and what tactics are spammers adopting to achieve their objectives? Most importantly, what can you do to comprehensively and cost-effectively protect your business against spam? The information presented in this newsletter is based on professional experience of providing proven messaging and web security management services for over 16,000 clients worldwide, with around 1.5 billion emails processed each week on their behalf.
Traffic & Trends This time of year traditionally sees companies suffering huge spam surges as spammers try to cash in on increased consumer spending in the run-up to Christmas. IT experts expect this year to be no exception to the rule.
• spam selling pharmacy products (e.g. Viagra), software, watches, etc;
• advanced "fee fraud” spam;
• “phishing” spam aimed at gathering personal information;
• casino/betting spam;
• dating/sexual spam During the month of November 2007, small to large businesses experienced a 900% increase in overall email volumes, averaged over a 24-hour period in which their domain was targeted by spammers.
At the attack’s height, email volumes peaked at 25 times normal levels. For many businesses, investing in more computing capacity so it can cope with spikes of this magnitude (or greater) simply isn’t an option. A Secure Solution Outsourcing to a managed anti-spam service can provide the most cost-effective way of protecting your business against all spam threats. Taking this option means you no longer need to rely on in-house appliance-based or software-based solutions that are especially vulnerable to spikes targeting your domain. Nor do you need to invest in massive extensions to your computing capacity to prevent spikes from overwhelming mail servers and breaking through your defenses.
Innovative Anti-Spam Service is capable of processing literally millions of messages and web requests. We plan for a maximum 45% load across the infrastructure means we can just soak up spam attacks, however huge, intensive or targeted they may be.
Please contact us for more information or solution pricing. Also, do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or require additional information reguarding this matter.