The Hindu Business Line : 60 pc of e-mails are junk: Study

Trend Micro's study reveals an exponential growth of spam or unsolicited junk e-mails. The numbers have doubled every year in the past three years. In 2002, junk mails comprised 25 per cent of all e-mail messages. This swelled to 40 per cent in 2003 and by mid-2004, it shot to 60 per cent. From being a mere nuisance, it is turning out to be a major problem for most enterprise networks and has spelled huge losses for many corporations.

"The virus and spam attacks cannot really be stopped, but can be controlled or minimised," said Mr Niraj Kaushik, Country Head, Trend Micro India.

The company is in the process of building technology to minimise such attacks. "We are currently engaged in building tools to counter such attacks. We work with the customer to assess and sort out the vulnerability of the virus by isolating and prioritising the exposure risk. Instead of waiting for the virus attack, we try and stop the spread of the malicious code by placing a check on the network traffic, say, at a particular port," he said.

Net users foresee some correlation between a holiday and spurt of virus around this period. But more than the problem of unsolicited junk e-mails that flood the inbox, it is the spam that plays the culprit, bringing with it the tide of fraud and phishing incidentce, resulting in costly losses to unwitting victims.

Sharing information about virus outbreak incidence and the emerging malware trends for 2005 with Business Line, Mr Kaushik said the most topical one would be the mobile virus, going by the steep rise in spam mails and virus attack on PCs and networks in recent years. "Though nascent, the mobile virus threat cannot be ruled out," he said.

On the 2004 trends, he said the year has seen an increase in bot programs, spam, phishing incidence, spyware and adware generation, indicating that most attacks were geared towards a quest to cash in on every popular Internet application and device and every available loophole.

Trend Micro has registered a total of 16.82 lakh spam mails in 2004. Over 34 per cent of this has been finance-related, while another 20 per cent was categorised under health category. "The sheer volume has directly affected productivity, eaten up precious bandwidth and generally wasted precious time, which could have been spent on productive pursuits," said Mr Kaushik.

"Just as most widely used technologies spawn a parallel avenue for misuse, so has e-mail generated spam as a side-effect. Spams have carved an increasingly profitable niche in the midst of the Internet boom."

Trend Micro has perceived an escalation in the incidence of phishing attacks. According to Mr Kaushik, phishing was emerging as a serious threat and was found to be most profitable. Between May and November 2004, Trend Micro has registered 9709 phishing mails. The study has revealed that Citibank was the prime target of phishing attacks.