Average spam message size at record low

No decrease of bandwidth usage as number of spam messages keeps increasing.

The average size of spam messages has decreased to a record low of just over 2KB, security company Marshal reports.

Advertise on www.virusbtn.com

The average size of spam messages was almost 11KB early in 2007, when spammers hid the content of their messages in images and used sophisticated HTML and garbage text to confuse Bayesian filters.

But it seems that spammers have come to the conclusion that these methods have little success in circumventing spam filters and several of the major botnets are now sending out short spam messages containing little more than a few lines of text and a link.

However, system administrators have no reason to expect this to have a positive effect on email bandwidth. A report by email security company Proofpoint states that the amount of spam has risen by 50 per cent in the first quarter of 2008, with some companies reporting an increase of 200 per cent. Proofpoint attributes this growth to new users on the internet.

"Many of these users are not savvy to modern social engineering techniques and also have limited access to virus protection," said Andres Kohn, vice president of product management for Proofpoint. "This makes them easy targets for malware designed to seize control of their computers. We expect this trend, and the commensurate trends in botnet and spam growth, to continue through 2008 and beyond."

An overview of the methods used by spammers can be found in John Graham-Cummings's Spammers' Compendium.

3 April 2008

Tags: marshal, proofpoint, spam.    del.icio.us  digg this! digg this

0 comments

Comments are closed.

Quick Links



Poll

When do you install software updates?
As soon as they are released
As soon as I have some time
I take my time, but I always install them eventually
Only when I feel it is absolutely necessary
Never
Leave a comment
View 12 comments

Jobs Recruit Sidebar

Twitter Feed

virusbtn: RT @emailsecmatters: The typical spam message has sources as diverse as the spam lunch meat: http://ht.ly/2yucd
2 hours ago


virusbtn: Can anyone write a rap about our RAP tests (http://bit.ly/255ySQ) and submit it to the Symantec competition http://bit.ly/bOJg8r
6 hours ago


Jobs

In Virus Bulletin's jobs pages among others:
Virus Bulletin currently has 208,224 registered users.