Worldwide spam levels reached 87% of all e-mail received during 2006, an increase of 30% from 2005, says a new report by Commtouch, a Nasdaq-listed anti-spam technology provider.
According to the report, zombies, which accounted for 85% of spam, have spread to all geographies, reaching eight million hosts on a given day.
Botnet armies, containing as many as 200 000 zombies, sprang up as they sought out unprotected computers with fast Internet connections, primarily home broadband users, the report says.
Approximately 500 000 new PCs are captured into zombie botnets each day, with a typical botnet having the capacity to send 160 million spam e-mails in just two hours, it says.
"No matter how you count it, spam is on the rise," the company says in a media statement.
Providers pummelled
High-profile free e-mail providers have been the most affected, with spam rates as high as 98%, the report says.
While business e-mail accounts have typically received a smaller percentage of spam than their consumer counterparts, they have increasingly become the target of spam in 2006, registering a 50% increase year-on-year. Some small enterprises have spam rates as low as 45%, the report notes.
Amir Lev, Commtouch president and CTO, says people felt the flood of spam more extensively in 2006 since many anti-spam technologies have not been able to keep up with the spammers' ever-growing bag of tricks.
"Innovative spammers quickly developed new techniques to bypass common anti-spam technologies and amassed huge zombie botnets. Outbreaks have become so fast, massive and sophisticated that most anti-spam solutions had great difficulty defending against them," he says.
A recent Sophos report indicates the US relays 21.6% of global spam, followed by China at 13.4%, France at 6.3%, South Korea at 6.3% and Spain at 5.8%.
The top 12 spam relay countries also include Poland, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Taiwan, Israel and Japan.
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