The latest dirt on the net

New figures have revealed increasing amounts of e-filth being spread online.

A statement issued by MessageLabs, a provider of email security services, regarding malware contamination levels in the month of November 2003, showed a high incidence of emails that contained viruses and spam.

Of the 345.7 million emails scanned by MessageLabs during November, 3.6 million were found to contain viruses. That's 1 percent of emails checked, at an interception rate of 1.4 viruses per second.

But that's nowhere as high as the spam figures. MesssageLabs found that, out of 277.8 million emails during November, 153 million turned up as spam. According to the report, this “equates to a global spam ratio of 55.1 percent”. MessageLabs claimed to have intercepted 59 spam emails per second.

One of the most disturbing figures in the report was that approximately one in every 12 emails received by the IT and telecommunications sector in the Asia Pacific region was infected with a virus. The global average for the IT and telco sector was one in 110; so this assault on Asia Pacific ITs and telcos was the highest suffered by any industry in any part of the world -- by a big margin.

The report found that the education sector rated the highest spam mail count in the Asia Pacific.

Interestingly, the Asia Pacific region scored the highest spam count geographically, while managing to keep virus counts far below Europe and the US.

More developed nations were now taking the initiative to outlaw spam, but these figures showed that there's still a lot of dirt floating around in cyberspace.

MessageLabs is a provider of managed email security services to businesses worldwide.