Problems Will Continue To Plague E-Mail Next Year

Postini, which filters e-mail for spam, viruses, and other threats for Internet service providers and enterprises -- its flagship service, Perimeter Manager, is deployed by over 2,000 organizations -- didn't pull its prognostications out of thin air. It based them on data acquired from processing over a billion messages per week during 2003, said Andrew Lochart, the company's director of product marketing.

The company's top prediction for 2004? Spam will continue to climb as a percentage of total e-mail from its current average rate of 50 percent to an even more alarming 75 percent in 2004.

"If you're not protected [against spam], things are going to get much worse," he said. "The volume of spam in both absolute terms and in percentage is increasing, and we don't see any trends on the horizon to mitigate that."

Postini's own numbers were even higher; out of the 160 million messages the company filtered a day during 2003, 81.3 percent were spam. During the year, the ratio of spam Postini encountered increased from 65 percent to over 80.

"Our own data usually notes a higher percentage of spam, but that because there's some element of self-selection going on," said Lochart. "If someone has a spam solution in place, it's usually because they've had a spam problem."

Another Postini prognostication -- number 4 on its list of 10 -- takes the stance that legislation, such as the just-signed-into-law CAN-SPAM Act, won't be the solution. "It's great to see the government doing something," said Lochart, "but it's essentially impossible to track down these people."

Although Lochart believes that some of the "knucklehead spammers who don't know how to hide will be nailed," by CAN-SPAM and anti-spam laws in other countries, enforcing them will prove difficult at best, impossible at worst. "The really hardcore spammers -- a group in the hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand -- won't be affected," Lochart predicted.

Some of Postini's predictions came easier than others. Directory harvest attacks -- where spammers send huge numbers of messages to e-mail address permutations such as [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] -- will continue to climb, if only because the practice can net spammers thousands of valid addresses in just minutes. Likewise, fraudulent e-mails that pose as legit messages and try to trick users into divulging financial information, dubbed 'phishing,' will rise significantly as well.

It's all economics. "Filtering vendors need to get the spam rate down to one in a hundred or one in a thousand," said Lochart, "before we have a chance of messing up the economics of spammers.

"As we block more and more spam, it has to make this economically unfeasible for at least some spammers," he added. "They're not like virus writers, they do what they do because they think they can make money."

On the virus front, Postini predicted that the next generation of the Sobig worm will prove to one of the most pervasive of 2004. That's another easy prediction, Lochart said, since the last round of Sobig -- tagged with the moniker of Sobig.F -- caused 2003's biggest spike in e-mail traffic. Postini, for instance, saw a 20-fold increase in filtered messages during the three days in August when Sobig.F roared through the Internet.

Still, not everything is doom and gloom. Lochart was confident that e-mail wouldn't entirely fall victim to spam, viruses, and other malicious attacks.

"The annoyance factor of spam for businesspeople, and the negative economic affect of threats such as phishing does seem to be creating some loss of trust in e-mail among users," he admitted. "But it can be only temporary. As ISPs and corporations move to current generation spam filtering, we'll get a better handle on this."

This story courtesy of TechWeb.