Understanding The Cybersecurity Implications Of The Spam Surge

As I discussed several weeks ago, everyone's seen that there has been a massive surge in spam over the last couple of months. More researchers are weighing in on what's behind it. One point many sources make, and I made in my last column, is that there was a "Christmas Spike" last year too. Spam shot up roughly from November 2005 through January 2006 and then tailed off until the late '06 surge, yielding a bowl-shaped curve for the year.

Will this year have a tail-off in February too? Ask me in March, but the people at MessageLabs don't expect to see one. They see a steadily increasing spam load through 2007, pushing the limits of our tolerance. PointerPhishing, pump-and-dump scams and voting security are things that keep us up at night. Click here to read about them in our special report on cyber-crime. Like Postini, with which I talked for my last column, MessageLabs is a hosted secure mail vendor. Such vendors process a tremendous amount of e-mail to and from areas all over the world (Postini was the biggest last time I checked). This puts them in an excellent position to make judgments about trends in e-mail generally, such as the overall prevalence of spam. I trust their numbers more than I trust those of plain software vendors, although it's worth noting that all these security vendors have an interest in the numbers looking bad.

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