87% of email is spam

SoftScan announced today while spam remains high at 87.72%, virus levels have doubled, but at 1.02% they still only account for a tiny proportion of the total email scanned by SoftScan during August.

89.50% of all viruses stopped by SoftScan were classified as phishing. The percentage of phishing emails stopped by SoftScan has increased dramatically in the last few months, but SoftScan believes this is as a result of improved or additional detection by anti-virus scanners rather than any real increase in the number of phishing emails distributed.

Diego d?Ambra, Chief Technical Officer of SoftScan comments, ?We have seen several minor outbreaks of Worm.Stration variants during August, but nothing major and virus activity generally continues to follow the trend of remaining low key. Recent enhancements and developments by the anti-virus industry to their scanners has meant an increase in detecting phishing emails as malware, as opposed to spam. This gives the impression that phishing has risen significantly, but in actual fact is really due to the re-classification from spam to malware.?

The top five virus groups in July are as follows:

1 Phishing: 89.50%

2 Netsky: 2.44%

3 Mytob: 2.19%

4 Bzub 1.42%

5 Bagle 1.22%

Spam remains very high at 87.72%, but this is expected to reduce by a few percent over the coming days as the traditional summer holiday season comes to a close. Then the increase in legitimate business email will push the percentage back down to its more regular level of 85%.

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