Spam: the cost leaves a bad taste

SPAM costs more than you think. New US research has found despite the advent of more sophisticated filtering systems, unsolicited emails costs every office workers US$712 (A$876) annually in lost productivity.

That puts the cost of spam to the US economy at a staggering US$70 billion.

IT market researchers Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm say users spend a little over one per cent of their time every day dealing with the spam in their inboxes.

A market survey of 850 workers carried out by the companies found users averaged 21 spam messages per day, and that two out of three email messages were spam, despite 60 per cent of companies having already deployed enterprise-wide filters.

Nucleus says its study is the most comprehensive research ever conducted on Spam. And despite the large numbers of spam messages getting through corporate filtering systems, it found the situation is better than it was three years ago.

In calculating the lost productivity of spam in 2004, Nucleus found the average user lost 3.1 per cent of their time to spam – that number has now reduced to 1.2 per cent of time.

The number of spam messages has fallen from 29 to 21, and enterprise spam policies like auto delete and quarantining has meant the average amount of time a user spends on each spam message has reduced from 30 seconds to 16 seconds since 2004.

“We calculated the cost of spam to corporations based on an average fully loaded cost of $30 per hour with a 2080-hour year. This brings the annual cost of spam to $712 per user per year, down from $1,934 in 2004,” the report found.

The research also attempted a rough guess at how annoying spam is for users.

And it found that users pretty annoyed … 18 per cent of those surveyed said spammers should be sent to jail, with a third of those saying the sentences should be three years or longer.

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Spam virus activity spikes in first quarter

DESPITE slowing marginally furing March, Spam levels increased more than 75 per cent during the first quarter to the highest levels in two years, according to managed security service provider MessageLabs.

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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