Communications and Technology Industry Research

Commtouch Software (News - Alert), a provider of messaging and Web security technology, today released its second quarter 2008 E-mail Threats Trend Report. This report is based on the automated analysis of billions of e-mail messages weekly and examines recent trends in e-mail threats. It specifically focuses on the role of millions of dynamic zombie computers actively sending spam and malware every day.

 

Based on Commtouch Lab’s research, the top domains revealed in the study with the most infected machines (aka zombies) were Telecom Italia, Brasil Telecom, and Verizon (News - Alert).

 

It was found that spam levels throughout the second quarter averaged 77 percent, ranging from a low of 64 percent to a peak of 94 percent of all e-mail towards the end of the quarter. Additionally, 10 million zombie IP addresses are active each day, on average.

 

The report showed that the United States dropped to ninth place in number of zombies globally, with Turkey as number one with 11 percent of all zombies.

 

Comprising 40 percent of all spam, pharmaceutical spam was discovered to be the most popular topic.

 

Morever, phishing scams took advantage of higher education community, as well as Google (News - Alert) adwords users. Spammers also experimented with vertical display in Chinese-language spam.

 

“Zombie networks or ‘botnets’ have become so enormous and agile, they are flooding email with increasingly malicious threats,” said Amir Lev, Commtouch’s chief technology officer and president.

 

“Many technologies attempt to identify and block email from senders known for sending malicious content, but they are not updated rapidly enough to keep up. By the time these lists are updated the threat has shifted to another set of zombies, leaving customers unprotected. On the one hand, ISPs have an obligation to protect their customers from unwanted email; however, they also have a responsibility to ensure that their customers are not a source of unwanted email by being part of these botnets,” explained Lev.

 

Commtouch Recurrent Pattern Detection technology identifies and blocks e-mail threats, including increasingly malicious malware and phishing outbreaks. Dynamic detection of zombie IPs provides effective protection against zombies, without causing high false positives.

 

More details, including samples of spam and malware messages, are available in the Commtouch Q2 2008 E-mail Threats Trend Report, available from Commtouch Labs at: http://www.commtouch.com/documents/Commtouch_Q208_Email_Trends.pdf.