SPAM

Spam

Depending on the source cited, spam makes up 70 to 84 percent of daily emails sent throughout the world. All that spam results in billions of dollars in lost productivity and creates an ever increasing need for IT resources to filter out this irritating and potentially malicious menace.

Spam email takes a variety of forms, ranging from unsolicited emails promoting products like Viagra, to coordinated spam attacks designed to take up so much bandwidth on a network so as to cause it to crash. A more recent trend is image spam, which eats up even more bandwidth than its textual cousin, and often circumvents contextual spam filters which analyze the message text to look for indications that the email is spam. Another brand new technique that spammers are using is called "news service" spam, which uses legitimate headlines such as "Howard Stern Earns $83M Bonus" to trick recipients into opening spam emails that are filled with spammy drug advertisements. These and other new spam trends constantly threaten the productivity of email and the security of IT networks.

Prevention
When it comes to fighting spam, fortunately, a great deal of spam can be filtered out by a good email filter. And much of what slips through can be avoided by staying current on the latest techniques that spammers use. In addition, however, you should protect your network from email spam by requiring your employees to use separate accounts for their personal internet use, and demand that company accounts not be used to sign up for any online service or freebie. In addition, when creating company email accounts make sure to use a naming system which is not easily guessable (e.g., JSmith@domain.com), as spammers are increasingly going through common name lists in order to harvest emails to spam.