Digital Trends

Spam-blocking firm Postini reports that in September it tracked up to 50,000 computers simultaneously misbehaving...and that four out of five email messages it audited were spam.

Message monitoring and security firm Postini has released some figures about the state of messaging and email on the Internet for September 2006…and the news is more depressing than ever.

Postini monitors email and other communications for over 36,000 organizations, examining more than one billion messages a day in case they're viruses, worms, phishing attacks, or plain-old spam. These days, it's more accurate to describe Postini as churning through sludge to find the few pieces of legitimate communication still using the Internet: during September 2006, Postini found that spam, phishing and virus attacks accounted for 80 percent of all the email it monitored, an increase of 1.6 percent from August. Further, during the month the company tracked up to 50,000 computers simultaneously engaged in malicious activity at any given time, whether distributing spam, attempting to propagate worms or viruses, or engaging in phishing schemes or other attacks.

For Septemmber, Postini found that the hotspots for malicious computers on the Internet were Seoul, South Korea; Sau Paulo, Brazil; Beijing, China; Herndon, Virginia, USA; and Tokyo, Japan. The most common viruses propagated during the month were variations on mass-mailing worms Netsky, MyTob, Beagle, and the now-venerable MyDoom, as well as the recent Windows MIME exploit.