Shock figure drawn from dubious source.
The
BBC
online news website has published an article under the headline ‘More than 95% of e-mail is “junk”‘.
The report, which was linked to from the
BBC News
front page on 27 July, draws together various statistics from
Return Path
,
IronPort
and
Sophos
, concentrating on the origins of spam and the number of compromised machines. The shock figure included in the headline, however, is later revealed to apply to
a single
IronPort
customer’s experience – they found only 4% of mails over a month-long period were legitimate (the remainder being 70% spam, 9% viruses, 11% ‘bounces and error messages’, and 6% unaccounted for in the statement).
IronPort
‘s spokesman is quoted as saying that around 80% of email is coming from compromised sources – a figure that is more in line with standard industry estimates.
Read the full piece here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5219554.stm
.
Check
MessageLabs
‘ latest stats here:
http://www.messagelabs.com/Threat_Watch/Threat_Statistics
.
Posted on 02 August 2006 by
Virus Bulletin
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