IT-Review

Spammers Ruin Brands' Reputation

Spammers' antics are ruining brands' reputations on the Web, according to a recent roundtable of leading industry experts and anti-spam campaigners hosted by e-security specialists Clearswift. The results of this month's spam index also support this, with healthcare suppliers' brands continuing to be hardest hit by spam peddling illicit medicinal offers.

Spammers are confusing consumers by intentionally blurring the boundaries between legitimate e-mail and unsolicited communications selling counterfeit goods. This has infuriated the direct marketing industries, who are relied upon to maintain brands' online presence, yet find themselves tarred with the same brush as unscrupulous cyber criminals.

Clearswift's latest spam index reveals that healthcare spam has risen to account for 57.6% of all spam. In fact Pfizer, who manufactures the male impotency drug Viagra, has vowed to take legal action against spammers, after recently finding that 25% of men believed Pfizer itself were responsible for sending Viagra spam. However, spam is not only damaging to the health of consumers and pharmaceutical brands -- scams related to other online retailers have also seen a dramatic increase. If this trend continues, it threatens to erode trust and damage the U.K.'s digital economy.

"Pfizer has set a precedent, but we are likely to see other companies declaring war on spammers for undermining their products," commented Alyn Hockey, director of research at Clearswift. "Suing such Web sites or seizing domain names may be harsh yet necessary routes where finding long-term solutions are concerned — until then we have to rely on technology, taking a multi-layered approach to content security in the fight against spam."

The roundtable panel, including Spamhaus, the Direct Marketing Association and the DTI, agreed that while education and legislation were vital, effort to date had only minimal impact in stemming the tide, and technology remained our best defense against spam.

The continued dominance of healthcare spam is revealed in the breakdown attached.

According to Clearswift's virus index, the numbers of Win32 malware viruses have seen significant growth over the last month, yet few managed to make any significant impact. Exceptions were variants of MyDoom, Bagle and Lovegate that reached medium-rated levels of outbreak. However, Bagle and MyDoom tend to be comparatively short-lived. Zafi.B remains on the radar. Despite the arrest of Sven Jaschan, the author of the Netsky and Sasser worms five months ago, Netsky.P still rides high as the undisputed leader of the malware league tables.

About the spam and virus indexes

The spam categorization statistics were extracted from the millions of spam e-mails harvested by Clearswift's seed accounts on a weekly basis. They are collated and analyzed using Clearswift's spamActive service, which is an integral component of the multi-layered anti-spam protection offered by MIMEsweeper for SMTP 5.0. Updated eight times daily, spamActive routinely extracts spam terms, sender domains, URLs and subject lines, which can be automatically downloaded to update customers' e-mail policies. The virus statistics are generated using raw data from Clearswift's e-Sweeper, a managed e-mail content security solution for service providers.

Source: press release

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