Though more businesses have anti-spam measures in place, companies received more spam e-mails in 2004, a new study found. Businesses spent more on preventing spam last year, yet it still represents 75 percent to 80 percent of all e-mail, according to the study from Postini, an e-mail security and managing firm.
“What we're seeing is a profound increase in the sophistication and incidence of tactics designed to fool conventional anti-spam filters,” said Chris Smith, senior product marketing director at Postini, Redwood City, CA.
The report also said virus attacks via e-mail grew threefold and directory harvest attacks continued to plague corporate e-mail servers.
Spammers also are targeting smaller companies — those with 100 users or fewer — because they have less-sophisticated defenses. Smaller firms get up to 10 times more spam than corporations, the study found.
And certain industries, including publishing, advertising, legal and real estate, received more than 10 times the amount of spam per user per day compared with organizations in banking, financial, manufacturing, electronics and pharmaceuticals.
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
