Software spam report.

Softscan have announced that the torrent of spam over the past month has not decreased, the final percentage of emails stopped by SoftScan as spam during November was 89.73%, marginally up from last month's 89.07%. Image spam, reportedly on the increase, is also becoming more sophisticated in an attempt to confuse scanners. Viruses remained low, accounting for just 0.42% of all email scanned. The list below shows the top five global zones that spam originated from, according to SoftScan's statistics. The most prolific country was Poland, which accounted for 15.3% of all junk mail sent from Europe.

1 Europe: 61.89%

2 Far East: 11.93%

3 North America: 10.26%

4 South America: 5.36%

5 South East Asia: 4.73%

Image spam used to just contain straight text on a white background, now increasingly spammers are trying to obfuscate scanners by introducing more complex images and colours. Text has also been disguised by changing its colour throughout the image and is frequently distorted. These changes make it difficult for less sophisticated anti-spam OCR scanners to detect, but the resulting image makes the majority of previous spam messages look almost professional.

"Some image spam might be going through undetected by lesser anti-spam scanners, but it is starting to resemble something a child could draw better," comments Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "Although it seems hard to believe the amount of people that do respond to spam messages, I think that the spammers might be hoisted by their own petard this time, I'm sure it wont be long until they start using more sophisticated images, along with their current techniques."

Top 5 viruses families in November were:

1 phishing: 71.30%

2 stration: 10.58%

3 netsky: 5.34%

4 downloader: 3.55%

5 mytob: 2.82%

www.softscan.com