Spam traffic hits record highs as spammers
go back to work after the summer holidays
The number of spam messages hitting New Zealand email systems has reached record levels, according to Auckland-based
anti-spam and virus service provider SMX.
SMX managing director Jesse Ball, says that his company maintains daily statistics of the type and volume of spam
messages identified.
“Late last year and early this year saw spam levels hitting record levels, then declining quite sharply. But in June of
this year levels started to rise steeply. By early July spam levels surpassed the all time highs of last January and
they’re continuing to climb steeply each day,” Jesse Ball says.
“In percentage terms, spam traffic in August this year was 100 percent up on spam traffic in May. That’s a fifty percent
increase on the previous record set in January this year.
“This means that last month 78 percent of all messages we cleaned for our customers was spam. Last week this peaked at
81 percent.”
The reason for the increase probably relates to spammers in the Northern Hemisphere returning from their summer
holidays. This, says Ball, accounts for the sudden ‘spike’ in volumes. However, the overall trend is fuelled by the fact
that spamming works.
“Even though only a tiny percentage of spam messages result in business for the spammers, the volumes of spam messages
are so huge and the cost so small for the spammers that the economics stack up. So we can expect to see spam volumes
continue to increase.
“This need not be a problem for business users,” Ball says. “Despite these record spam levels, SMX customers have
continued to receive emails 99.97 percent clean of spam and 100 percent clean of viruses.”
This, says Ball, is a major endorsement for the SMX approach which is to have customers route their emails through SMX
servers before delivery. This way, SMX is able to constantly monitor the flow of spam and constantly tune the filters to
beat new spam techniques. SMX provides this as a service, paid for on a per user per month basis, compared to a
product-based solution which requires users to regularly update their hardware and software.
About SMX
Launched in February 2006, SMX is a privately-owned secure email software development and services company. The SMX
proposition is to clean mail of viruses and spam to 99.97 percent accuracy. The conceptual innovation is to offer this
’99.97 percent clean’ customer outcome as a service, paid for on a monthly per user basis, rather than as a software
product installed on a customer’s own system and requiring IT staff to upgrade, maintain and provision. The technology
innovations include the unique ability to service multiple customers out of a single system (multi-tenanted). No other
service-based solution is so easily scalable, and no other is so fast to deploy – taking literally two or three phone
calls and less than half a day to fully deploy across the largest organisation.
Based in Auckland, SMX founders Jesse Ball and Thom Hooker lead a sales and development team focused on local direct
sales as well as local and international sales through reseller and licence agreements. A professional Board is headed
by chairman John Quirk of IT investment advisors Howard and Company.
Currently SMX has a total of 20,000 users and a rapidly-growing blue chip customer list including the AA, TAB, Sealord,
ESR, and RHE and Associates.
ENDS