The Size Of Spam
It’s not just user productivity that spam hits, with images doubling the file size of spam.
SoftScan announced today that the average size of a spam message has increased by 77 percent since September last year and continues to steadily grow. SoftScan attributes the enlargement of file size to the noticeable rise in image spam in recent months and warns that this will add to the cost managing email for some organisations that have to scale-up bandwidth and storage requirements to meet demands.
Since September last year individual spam emails have increased from an average of 6.62kb to 11.76kb. Although still relatiely small in size, the sheer volume of spam that many businesses receive means that even only a slight rise can have a significant effect. Organisations that stop spam at their email servers still have to pay for the bandwidth to receive it and depending on how their email back-up is configured storage costs may rise too if spam is included in the archive.
"Spam is no longer just an issue of user productivity," comments Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "The growth in file size combined with the increasing volume of spam now means that many different aspects from network administration to internet bandwidth are affected. Email file size is going to become a real headache for businesses, particularly if spammers start to use other types of medium such as audio or video files once the tactic of image spam no longer works against the majority of filters."
Spammers use images for a variety of reasons from avoiding detection to making their message more attractive to potential buyers. The first junk emails that used images were just graphics attached to an email, next came embedded coloured backgrounds and more recently the backgrounds have change to variety of different colours in the hope that they will fool scanning techniques.
Image spam is most frequently used with 'pump and dump' spam, which tries to tempt the user to buy particular shares in the knowledge of a 'hot tip'. But no sooner have enough people bought the shares, then the spammer sells theirs for a profit and the share price collapses.
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