Commtouch released yesterday its annual report on email threats and trends the company collected in 2007.
Not that we needed reminding, but spam now represents over 80% of all global email traffic, reaching a peak of over 95% in Q4 of last year.
Numerous news wires and blogs reported a serious email problem at the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that resulted in a tidal wave of emails between about 7,500 department employees and external security professionals; said to have generated over 2 million email messages on Wednesday alone.
“The Department of Homeland Security self-inflicted what one observer called a mini distributed denial of service, with a reported mass of more than 2.2 million messages stuffing the inboxes of the nation’s security experts.”
Here is another story from the field that seems appropriate to share as we are still in the midst of vacation season.
A couple a years ago, our consulting team received a call from an alarmed customer who noticed a sudden increase in mail traffic that appeared to be growing more rapidly every day and was starting to overload the mail servers at the Internet gateway.
I have been following an interesting blog thread on ZDnet between two of their writers, David Berlind and George Ou. It all started when David took issue with the practice of sending passwords as clear text via email as some websites still do as part of their password reset routine. This brought up the topic of secure email. As David points out:
“The technology exists. It’s just not found in every e-mail client nor are businesses prepared to alter their processes to handle this approach.”
Having been an avid viewer of “The Simpsons” since my college days, this one caught my attention.
The security company Sophos reports on its website that Spammers use the upcoming release of “The Simpsons Movie” in yet another attempt to lure unsuspecting email recipients into confirming their email addresses.
Gartner is joining other analysts, such as Forrester, in predicting that Enterprise Instant Messaging is quickly becoming a mission critical business application.
Stefan Mehlhorn is the CEO of Permessa Corp. a Waltham, MA based company providing enterprise messaging management solutions and consulting services to many of the worlds largest corporations.
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