Email becoming a liability for business

Email is fast becoming a liability for businesses, according to experts. This is in the light of attacks by hackers that saw ISP Plusnet's list of subscribers' email addresses stolen.

Plusnet's customers were told by the firm to change password details after it emrged that hackers gained control of the ISP's email server and stole the address list from it.

The list was then passed onto spammers who unleashed a torrent of spam at the affected subscribers. The ISP shut down its webmail service while engineers fixed the problem.

While Plusnet customers got spammed, the ISP also warned customers of possible malware infection.

"As a result of the attack a small number of customers may have downloaded a trojan virus," the company said in a statement on its website.

Experts said that this attack highlighted the growing problem of spam.

"As spam proliferates, the email problem will only get worse and will cause corporate networks to struggle with the sheer volumes of messages they're attempting to filter at the gateway," said Symon Blomfield, chief executive of secure instant messaging company Presence Networks.

He said that as spam now accounts for 95 per cent of all email globally, business should consider alternatives to email as a communication tool.

Analysts said that companies need to reduce spam by looking at technologies such as reputation-based filtering at the gateway.

"Reputation-based filtering reduces malicious traffic (e.g., phishing, spam, and other attacks), but it can also reduce unwanted traffic from non-business sources (e,g., unsolicited newsletters, investment opportunities, etc.)," said Charles Kolodgy, research director at IDC. "Taken together, these two elements can reduce attacks and messaging volumes resulting in greater bandwidth availability and greater employee productivity."

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