Record year for email spam

Not that any CIO wants to hear this, but spammers ran rampant in 2007. And if you never saw any spam on your system, you had a great spam filter or you were very lucky. In 2007, spam accounted for a large percentage of email traffic, according to SpamStopsHere, a provider of e-mail security and spam filtering solutions. Phishing attacks rose dramatically, too. And spam got more sophisticated. In addition to just blanketing the Internet, spam culprits attached their worms in devious ways to MP3, Zip, Excel, Word and PDF files. There's a lot of surveillance that must take place to prevent this kind of infection.

One spam attack involved the Storm Worm, which claimed to have information about storms. The spam was so effective that experts say the number of PCs infected by Storm Worm could reach 10 million. So what's a CIO to do? Well there is the usual stuff. Train your employees to be wary of strange email, get a strong spam filter and just hope that 2008 will be the year that spam is finally contained and conquered.

For more on growing spam attacks:
 - See this press release