[WEB4LIB] Security Summary for 2004: The year of phishing,

[Jerry Kuntz]

I don't have the article in front of me, but Symantec released a study this past Summer indicating that spam now accounts for over 80% of all email traffic; up from 35% just two years earlier.
And in the same breath cited industry experts who predicted that people wouldn't stop using email until that figure rose over 95%.

We try to do our best to stem the flow on our email servers, but often our efforts to tighten the rules result in complaints that legitimate email is being flagged as spam. It does make us wonder how far down the road we'll go before coming to the point of deciding the maintenance costs of offering an open email system aren't worth the benefits.


---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: lists at lisnews.com
Reply-To: lists at lisnews.com
Date:  Thu, 16 Dec 2004 06:28:42 -0800 (PST)

>the F-Secure Corporation has a rather nice look back at 2004: Security
>Summary for 2004: The year of phishing, professional virus-writing, and
>arrests.
>
>http://www.f-secure.com/2004/
>
>They look back at 2004 and call it a mixed bag. The beginning of the year
>was record-breaking busy with a huge number of major new virus outbreaks.
>However, since June, things calmed down and we've only had a few serious
>outbreaks since. New trends in 2004 were primarily the massive increase in
>phishing email scams, introduction of open-source botnets - networks of
>infected machines harnessed for malicious operations, and for-profit
>virus-writing, but this year was also the best year ever in actually
>catching virus writers and other cyber criminals.
>
>This quote caught my eye:
>
>"Current email systems are in serious trouble. I'm afraid we need to do a
>major overhaul of the underlying email standards in the near future. This
>would mean changing the basic protocols to more robust ones and adding
>strong user authentication. This would be a massive and very expensive
>project...which means it won't be done until the current email systems
>simply stop working"
>
>There are days I think we're already there, if I had a tenth of a cent for
>each SPAM message that comes into LISHost, I'd be a millionaire in a week.
>
>-----
>Blake Carver
>LISNews.com
>http://lisnews.com
>
>
>

--
Jerry Kuntz
Electronic Resources Consultant
Ramapo Catskill Library System
jkuntz at rcls.org

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