CircleID

While the news will not be terribly surprising to CircleID readers, Google's latest report on the status of spam and 2009 predictions posted today, might be of particular interest due to the company's shear email processing volume at 2 billion enterprise email connections per day (drawn from company owned Postini Message Security network).

What Google Saw: "Spam threats rose visibly in 2008, reflecting the overall trend of rising attacks. Even with the drop in November 2008, spam levels climbed 25% over 2007. Our statistics show that the average unprotected user would have received 45,000 spam messages in 2008 (up from 36,000 in 2007). All indicators suggest this trend will continue as virus, malware, and link-based attacks become both more frequent and more ingenious."

Heuristic Virus Detection: Last year we released advanced new anti-virus heuristics that specifically targeted zero-hour vulnerability (the period of time between when a new virus enters the wild and the release of the anti-virus signature file). When the zero-hour protection identifies a suspicious message, the message is scanned using the new anti-virus heuristics, and if confirmed as a virus, the message is quarantined.

Read the entire blog post here.

Related topics: Cyberattack, Cybercrime, Email, Malware, Spam