Spam and Malware Detections at 100,000 per Hour

Spam detection software company Mail-Filters.com reported that last week its servers had detected an average of 103,967 sources of spam or malware per hour being sent to its customers. The company warned, however, that this was only "the tip of the iceberg" and the number of pieces of spam and malware sent were likely much larger.

"Given that the typical number of spammers in any given hour is in the hundreds, we can say that the vast majority of these machines are hijacked. Not only that, this is a one hour snapshot of spammers sending messages to our partners' customers," Ben Westbrook, CEO of Mail-Filters said.

"You can easily see that millions of computers continue to be hijacked for the purpose of sending spam and phish."

Westbrook said that the real problem here is not the people sending the spam, it's the infected computers. Once a computer becomes hijacked, it can become a source for spam and malware e-mails. These computers are then "blacklisted" by their IP address, which means legitimate e-mails could end up being inadvertently blocked.

Spammers are becoming smarter in how to hijack personal computers so the problem may get worse, and eventually could slow the whole e-mail system down if the problem is not dealt with soon. Several companies, most notably Microsoft, have begun to aggressively pursue spammers through legal measures, to varying degrees of success.

In February, the company alerted its customers to this problem. Mail-Filters claims its software can tell the difference between a spam source and a hijacked computer, but says other anti-spam measures are often fooled by this practice. The company says that its software has a 95% catch rate with less than one in one million false positives.