October's spam and virus statistics.

Softscan announced that the amount of email stopped as spam by SoftScan during October was 96.10%. Although the highest levels of spam seen at the weekend, when there is less business email, have not risen significantly since last month, the spam levels during week days have remained consistently high.

"Spam distribution has reached unprecedented levels," comments SoftScan. "If advanced technology was not in place to prevent it from reaching users, businesses would be ground to a halt. Two factors seem to behind the increase. Firstly the spammers are still finding it difficult to get through filters and are using volume as tactic. Secondly and more sadly, they must still be making money, which means a significant number of people are still not taking sufficient care over the protection they afford their computer and therefore their personal details."

Unlike previous months, spam levels during October did not drop below 90%, in fact the lowest level recorded was 93.79% at the beginning of the month. Conversely viruses reached an all time low, accounting for just 0.08% of business email traffic during the last month.

The top five virus families in October 07 were:

1 -- phishing: 66.16%

2 -- pdf: 12.89%

3 -- downloader: 5.53%

4 -- netsky: 4.03%

5 -- mytob: 1.51%

www.softscan.co.uk