The torrent of spam over the past month has not decreased. The final percentage of emails stopped by SoftScan as spam during November was 89.7 per cent, marginally up from October's 89.1 per cent. Image spam, reportedly on the increase, is also becoming more sophisticated in an attempt to confuse scanners. Viruses remained low, accounting for just 0.4 per cent 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 per cent of all junk mail sent from Europe.

1. Europe: 61.9 per cent
   
2. Far East: 12.0 per cent
   
3. North America: 10.3 per cent
   
4. South America: 5.4 per cent
   
5. South East Asia: 4.7 per cent

Image spam used to just contain straight text on a white background. Now spammers are increasingly 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.

Top 5 viruses families in November were:

1. phishing: 71.3 per cent
   
2. stration: 10.6 per cent
   
3. netsky: 5.3 per cent
   
4. downloader: 3.6 per cent
   
5. mytob: 2.8 per cent

Related links: (Open in a new window.)
www.softscan.co.uk

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