Spam levels hit new high

Inboxes were swamped with record amounts of junk mail last month, according to a new report.

Research carried out by IT security company SoftScan said that 91.90 per cent of all email in August was identifiable as spam. Daily levels peaked at 96.89 per cent. This, it claimed, was the highest amount of spam ever recorded in a single day. This broke the June record when the company recorded daily spam levels of 96.55 per cent in June.

It forecasted that levels of unsolicited junk mail would increase by 40 per cent in September as figures had already been on the rise last month.

"For the third time this year spam level records have been broken," said Diego d'Ambra, chief technology officer at SoftScan. "With no evidence that the increase is likely to abate anytime soon, we believe this trend of exceptionally high spam levels is likely to continue and that September will see even higher levels of spam."

He said that the latest variant of Storm worm emails, which now poses as a You Tube video featuring the email recipient, is just the latest social engineering tactic in a long line of storyboard changes we expect to see over the next few weeks.

In contrast, virus levels had hit new lows with on 0.28 per cent of emails identified as carrying a virus.

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