Do you know what is Spam?
Do you know that spam has grown to about 90 billion messages a day?
Do you know what is expected during 2008?

Well, according to the spam.abuse.net spam is the flood of identical messages sent to the individuals who might never be interested in certain advertisings. They are of 2types:

Cancellable Usenet spam - a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet newsgroups.
Usenet spam - aimed at "lurkers", people who read newsgroups but rarely or never post and give their address away.

The observations show that the level of expected spam is going to increase during 2008. Proofpoint, Inc. that is the leading provider of unified email security and data loss prevention solutions, announced that (PARC) the Proofpoint Attack Response Center has seen enterprise spam volumes rise by more than 50% during the first quarter of 2008 accompanied by short-term spikes of 60% or more. Though some enterprises noticed spam volume increases as high as 200% in Q1 2008.

As the official site claims the rise of spam level between 500% and 700% within a period of hours will cause strain IT network infrastructure to the point of failure.

Andres Kohn, vice president of product management for Proofpoint said: “Botnets continue to proliferate and are by far the dominant source of spam”. “The Storm botnet, already the largest network of compromised machines in history, doubled in size during the 2007 holiday season alone. Other botnets such as Mega-D, emulate Storm in technical sophistication and may already surpass Storm as the largest generators of spam. The massive computing power and network resources associated with these botnets allow spammers and scammers to constantly increase the aggressiveness and scale of their attacks.”

In addition to this background of the IT field, the new users of internet are less able to have access to virus protection.

Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research said that “Enterprises today need to prepare themselves for two trends that will continue for the foreseeable future: rising spam volume and sudden, unpredictable short spikes in spam volume,” “This means enterprises not only need highly effective anti-spam technology, but also effective capacity strategies that can accommodate sudden wild fluctuations in volume. Most companies today have the former, but not the latter, and are encountering problems.”

To solve the problem Proofpoint’s messaging security experts recommendation is as follows, enterprises deploy both a combination of connection-level protection combined with highly accurate content analysis features to combat growing spam volume.

Proofpoint’s connection management solution, Proofpoint Dynamic Reputation™, studies both global and local reputation data to provide maximum protection against malicious IP addresses by combining machine learning analysis.

Proofpoint offers a free spam audit for those organizations that want to understand the impact of spam and potential solutions for rising spam volumes.