Spam and viruses unite to cause security chaos

06 September 2004

In a worrying trend for organisations around the world, spammers and virus writers are teaming up to create more chaos for business. The new threat means viruses may infiltrate an organisation via spam.

CITEC's A/Director Infrastructure Management, Phil Murray said the trend highlighted the need for organisations to adopt a comprehensive security solution, which protects against spam as well as viruses.

“Anti-spam and anti-virus protection mechanisms are bigger than the sum of their parts,” he said.

“Organisations which only have anti-virus protection are still vulnerable to viruses transmitted via spam.”

CITEC's partner MessageLabs, which screens more than 55 million emails a day, wrote of the convergence trend in its July Intelligence Report.

“Virus writers and spammers are combining their skill sets to produce a more sophisticated breed of email security threat,” the report says. This fusion of email attack methods is known as convergence.

The report cites recent viruses such as MyDoom, Fizzer, Bugbear and the SoBig worms as examples of the convergence trend.

MessageLabs Technical Director, David Banes said his company was now seeing spam being used to spread viruses that are undectable by traditional gateway or desktop software.

“If you're not stopping spam coming into your organisation, you could be compromised and not even know it,” he said.

“It is also significant that every virus MessageLabs has intercepted during 2004 has lent itself to potential spam distribution, almost without exception.

“As testament to the prevalence of convergence, around 70% of the spam MessageLabs intercepts on a daily basis has been sent via machines compromised by viruses.”

CITEC's Phil Murray says viruses transmitted via spam impact organisations in many different ways.

Three reasons to install an anti-spam solution

“Viruses distributed via spam are costing businesses money by disrupting operations, wasting bandwidth, decreasing employee productivity and putting strain on storage and mail servers,” he said.

“Businesses are also at risk of legal action for sending spam, even if it was sent from a computer that had been compromised without their knowledge.”

More about MessageLabs

MessageLabs is the leading provider of managed email security services to businesses based on market share, according to the Yankee Group Security Solutions & Services, February 2004 Report. The company offers industry-leading managed Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Image Control and Content Control services to more than 8,500 businesses around the world to combat email threats before they reach corporate networks and without the need for additional hardware or software. For more information on MessageLabs, please visit www.messagelabs.com.

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