Posted by Virus Bulletin on Aug 2, 2006
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
