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97 Percent of Spam Gets Filtered, Microsoft Says
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April 20, 2009

97 Percent of Spam Gets Filtered, Microsoft Says

By Gary Kim, Contributing Editor


The bad news: more than 97 percent of e-mail messages sent over the Internet are unwanted: They have malicious attachments, are phishing attacks, or are spam, says the Microsoft (News - Alert) Security Intelligence Report Volume 6 July through December 2008.

 
The good news: Users aren’t actually receiving most of those unwanted messages. Using Microsoft’s Forefront Online Security for Exchange as an example, the Internet security report says about 97.3 percent of total email volume is identified as spam and filtered out.
 
Spam in the second half of 2008 was dominated by product advertisements, primarily pharmaceutical products (48.6 percent of the total). Together with non-pharmacy product ads (23.6 percent of the total), product advertisements accounted for 72.2 percent of spam in 2H08.
 
However, as far as security threats are concerned, the number of unique vulnerabilities is down about 12 percent from its first-half 2007 high to just under 3,000 disclosures in the second half of 2008. 52 percent of those threats were categorized as critical, but were down 16 percent from 2007. 8.8 percent of vulnerabilities affected operating systems, 4.5 percent browsers and the remaining 86.7 percent other applications.
 
In terms of actual security breaches, about 50 percent of reports are based on stolen (33.5 percent) or lost (16.5 percent ) computers. Hacks account for about 15 percent of breaches, Microsoft said.
 
The company claims that Vista users are affected by far less security issues than Windows XP users. According to Microsoft, Windows XP computers are showing the most security problems, followed by XP SP1, XP SP2, XP SP3, Vista, Vista SP1 and Vista 64-bit. The most secure operating system is Windows Server 2008, according to the released charts.
 
 

Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi


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