Spam will double email traffic by Easter

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The current flood of spam and viruses could end up doubling email traffic in as little as two months if it continues, security experts are advising.

Managers of enterprise networks are being warned that there's no end in sight to the spam crisis, and that email systems will most likely have their performance further dented as spammers find cleverer ways of propagating their unsolicited messages.

Mark Thomas, a director of independent security benchmarking organisation West Coast Labs, says many businesses are struggling to do anything to stem the tide of unwanted email. "Postini has estimated there were seven billion spams sent in November alone, globally," he told IT PRO. "Levels rose around threefold between June and November last year, and it's probably going to get worse."

"I'm getting asked 'How long is this rise in spam going to go on for'," says Greg Millar, vice president of sales for security firm Email Systems. ""But the answer is that no one knows. It's affecting network bandwidth and slowing down processing power in all sorts of organisations."

The problem has considerably worsened, he says, as spammers have changed tactics, resulting in a 25-35 per cent month-on-month increase in overall email volume.

These spammers, says Millar, have found a way to distribute individual spam mails to individual email addresses, each featuring small differences to mark the message as unique and thereby evade detection. Farms of infected zombie PCs are another part of the problem, he says: "If a network of 1,000 zombie PCs sends 1,000 spams each, that's a million right there."

As fast as anti-spam specialists can 'crack' the problem, spammers find new ways to get round blockages, says Millar: "One IT manager I was talking thought they had a problem with 3,000 spams a day. A few months later they were getting 160,000. They said 'How can I make it go away'. But you can't. The best you can do is manage it so you can have as normal as business life as possible."

He says that network-level hardware and software protection has been largely ineffectual at containing many recent spam and virus surges and claims that web-based protection has proved more robust.

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