Spam accounted for 95% of all email traffic in 2007. Spammers grew increasingly brazen and diverse in their attack strategies. We saw attack strategies that have not typically been seen in previous years. Spammers experimented with attaching encoded messages in different file formats such as MP3, Zip, Excel, Word and PDF. MP3 spam proved to be interesting but short lived. Spammers attached MP3 files which were named after popular recording artists and songs. After a recipient had opened the attachment, an electronically enhanced voice delivers a message promoting a stock for a particular company. Many wonder if iPod spam could be next.

2007 was also the year of the “Worm.” The Storm Worm blew through inboxes like a hurricane. Spammers unleashed the Storm Worm in early 2007 in emails claiming to have information about storms in Europe. The Storm worm was devised to infect PCs for the purpose of sending spam, or as a host computer that is capable of infecting other PCs. Experts have estimated the number of infected PCs could be as high as 10 million.

Phishing scams also reached critical levels. Banking, IRS, eBay and PayPal phishing attacks rose dramatically in 2007. SpamStopsHere recommends the following guidelines when confronted with a suspected phishing attack.

1. If an email asks you to log-in to your bank, PayPal, eBay or other personal account, assume it is a phishing scam.

2. Never enter banking information, social security numbers or other sensitive information into any web site that resulted from clicking a link in an email.

3. Never enter your computer user name and password into any email that requests it, not even if it claims to be from your IT manager or other co-worker. It is easy for a spammer to forge the sender's name.

4. If you are unsure as to the legitimacy of a particular email, open an internet browser and manually type in the URL of the institution in question, e.g. www.chase.com. Do not use the URL in the email as a reference, as it may be a forgery.

“2007 was a challenging year for the antispam industry and a phenomenal year for us,” said Ted Green, President of SpamStopsHere. “With spam reaching such critical levels, our customer base has grown substantially due to the simple fact that many of our competitors have difficulty keeping their antispam solutions up to date with the latest spam campaigns. SpamStopsHere has a team of technicians that review spam 24 hours, seven days a week. This allows us to update our system every minute and block the latest spam campaigns.”

SpamStopsHere leads the industry in accuracy and is the only hosted Enterprise-level precision e-mail filtering solution on the market today. With its unique databases of known spam and spammers (updated every minute), SpamStopsHere blocks 99% of spam without blocking business-critical e-mails. SpamStopsHere achieves this industry leading accuracy “out of the box”; there is no tuning or maintenance required! Implementing SpamStopsHere’s managed solution requires no hardware, no software, no updating by IT staff and is ideal for any Enterprise ranging from 10 to 50,000 end-users.

About Greenview Data:

Greenview Data, Inc. has been providing its critically acclaimed SpamStopsHere network security solutions to clients across the globe since 2002. Greenview Data also created and developed the powerful VEDIT™ text editor, which has been licensed to over 150,000 users since 1980. EBCDIC to ASCII conversion makes up the third division of Greenview Data, providing conversion solutions through turn-key contracting and consulting. Through the growth of their SpamStopsHere hosted service and exciting R&D projects, Greenview Data is looking to the future and another successful 28 years. Greenview Data is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ted Annis
Marketing Director
Greenview Data / SpamStopsHere
Ph: 734-426-7500
Fax: 734-426-7510 www.SpamStopsHere.com