MessageLabs Intelligence Report for March also found that it is small and medium sized businesses that are copping the worst of the spam problem, with SMBs receiving more than double the volume of spam compared to enterprise organisations.
Quarter on quarter, virus and botnet activity also increased, also with SMB wearing more than larger, better resourced organisations.
MessageLabs said SMBs were not targeted by spammers any more than large organisations, but were less likely to have defences in place to deal with the problem.
For small businesses, spam can very quickly become a silent killer, overwhelming the resources of the mail system before any effective countermeasures can be enforced, the report said.
“Today, spam is considered a side effect of email,” MessageLabs chief security analyst Mark Sunner said.
“The majority of small businesses view spam as an ongoing irritation rather than a real threat and have given up on dealing with the issue only to find that bad guys target them even more aggressively.
“If the first quarter data tells us anything, it’s that malicious activity in the form of spam will only continue on an upward trend,” Mr Sunner said.
Also in Q1 2007, MessageLabs saw virus and trojan traffic levels steadily decline from last year with rates of 1 in 126.1 emails. While the overall levels decreased, MessageLabs believes that virus and Trojan activity is actually on the rise with spammers delivering them disguised as spam.
Phishing activity accounted for 70.8 per cent of the malware threats this quarter, an increase of 8.6 per cent on the previous quarter.
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