27 May 2009

Spam 'causing headache for firms'

Research carried out by MessageLabs has shown that the proportion of spam emails being sent to hosted exchange servers reached 90 per cent last month.

This figure increased by five per cent from March, with the increase posing a continued risk to disaster recovery efforts for firms, as businesses must focus more efforts on filtering this junk mail and less on business continuity.

"As spam levels continue to increase, we are seeing existing attack techniques combine and morph into one," said Paul Wood, senior analyst at MessageLabs.

The MessageLabs report noted that the majority of this increase is down to emails containing links to social networking profile pages and nothing else.

Meanwhile, research carried out by Gartner recently showed that more businesses are switching their email to hosted email companies in order to benefit from improved storage capacity and a reduction in in-house maintenance costs.