Businesses in the U.S. spent $1,500 - $2,000 per employee to fight spam, junk email and viruses. That's up significantly from the $600 - $800 spent in previous years. SPAM and other message based threats are growing proportionally and have far reaching global effects and business implications.

While spam definitely affects companies, smaller companies feel it much more so than do larger enterprises. This result is not necessarily because larger companies are less affected by spam, but it appears that in larger companies IT personnel—as well as management—are less aware of the overall impact of spam on their company. IT activities are much more specialized and IT personnel are not as accessible to end users in larger companies.

SPAMMERS AND HACKERS ARE MOTIVATED BY PROFIT
While early spammers, virus developers and hackers were motivated primarily by notoriety
and the challenge of spreading their wares; modern-day attacks are motivated mostly by
profit. Spammers, for example, can earn significant amounts of money by selling products
marketed through spam – such as stock “pump-and-dump” schemes – or by directing
people to advertising-laden sites on which they earn a commission for clickthroughs. Virus
writers, phishers, developers of keystroke loggers and others can make money by stealing it
from bank accounts or via fraudulent credit card transactions; or they can simply sell this
account information to others.

The profit motive has dramatically exacerbated the threats faced by messaging and Web
users. Because significant profits are available to spammers, phishers, criminal networks
and others, many people have been attracted to this “market”. Further, because profits
from malicious activities are substantial, they can be used to fund newer and better
methods for circumventing defenses against their attacks.

There is a real feeling of anger over spam. This result ties into the fact that spam is something that is created outside the company, yet requires extensive resources to combat. A key implication is that anti-spam tools are viewed more as insurance, and thus there is a strong desire to keep solution costs low.

BOTNETS ARE A CRITICAL PROBLEM
In the past, spammers sent large numbers of messages from a small number of sources that
were fairly easy to identify and block. More recently, however, spammers have created
botnets that consist of millions of ‘zombie’ computers – computers in homes and the
workplace that are infected with a virus, worm or Trojan that permits them to be controlled
by a remote entity. According to Commtouch, more than 85% of spam messages and
nearly 100% of malware messages are sent from zombie machines. As of early 2008,
Google Message Security had tracked a 62% increase in the daily number of unique IP
addresses that are blocked by its network compared to early 2007. This is a clear
indication of the growth of botnets.

WEB-BASED THREATS ARE A SERIOUS PROBLEM, AS WELL
There has been a huge increase in malicious Web-borne content, including email
messages that contain links to dangerous Web sites, attachments that are little more than
stage-one downloaders of other malicious code from the Web, malware that installs and
opens a communication channel to the attacking source, and other exploits. Typically,
these malware sites succeed in creating more zombie bots that keep feeding the vicious
cycle of spam and viruses. So...be carefull of links to Websites you get in an email.

THE SILENT KILLER: HOW SPAMMERS ARE STEALING YOUR EMAIL DIRECTORY
There is a “silent killer” unleashed by spammers that is threatening to steal your email directory addresses through what is known as a “directory harvest attack”(DHA).You may have already observed some of the symptoms of these virtually undetectable attacks on your email systems.
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AS THE NUMBER OF ELECTRONIC MESSAGES INCREASES, SPAM CONTINUES TO BE
THE BIGGEST ISSUE FOR MOST ORGANIZATIONS
As the number of electronic messages increased in 2007, spam continued to be the biggest issue for most organizations. The proliferation of communications in 2007 − through email, Web, and IM − brought with it a corresponding rise in the volume of spam. In 2007, Postini’s data centers recorded the highest levels of spam and virus attacks in history. While overall email message volume per user grew 47% in 2007 over the prior year, spam volume was up 57% in the same time period, according to Postini’s data center research.

Much of this growth was fueled by an increase in the number of bot-net computers − networks of infected PCs with broadband internet connections − co-opted by hackers without the owner’s knowledge to send spam messages and virus attacks.

In 2007, Postini blocked 160% more spam messages than in 2006, even as spammers became more sophisticated in their attempts to evade detection by spam filters. The early part of 2007
was marked by the pervasiveness of image spam, where the spam content is contained in an image attached to the email message. Over the course of the year, image spam declined and
was replaced by spam content contained in PDF, document, spreadsheet, and even multimedia attachments, such as MP3 files.