SoftScan sees sudden drop of spam levels at the end of March

SoftScan has announced that spam accounted for 96.63% of all email scanned in March, making it the third consecutive month that junk mail levels have remained steady. However, the company did notice a sudden 40-45% drop in the amount spam stopped at its first level of protection, the reputation filter, in the last few days of March.

"Although there was a significant drop in spam levels at the reputation filter, we didn't see any drop at our main spam filters," explains Diego d'Ambra, CTO of SoftScan. "This leads us to believe that spammers are cleaning up their infrastructure and are possibly starting to stop sending spam mails that will be automatically picked up by reputation filters anyway. In some respects the drop in spam is good news, but I'm sure it won't be long until the spammers reveal their next tactic to replace the "missing" junk mail."

When an email is accepted by SoftScan's servers, the Reputation Filter performs an assessment of the sender. It looks-up the IP address in a number of internal and external databases that collect data about the senders of spam and viruses. SoftScan constantly monitors and rates the quality of the external databases to ensure that it only blocks emails from "black-listed" senders. When an email is rejected by the Reputation Filter the sender immediately receives a status email explaining the reason for the rejection.

Virus levels remained typically low during the month accounting for just 0.07% of all email scanned.

The top five virus families in March 08 were:

1 - phishing: 77.66%
2 - dropper: 10.96%
3 - ban: 2.83%
4 - diehard: 2.07%
5 - netsky: 1.79%

About SoftScan

SoftScan is one of the leading providers of managed security services for mail, web and instant messaging. SoftScan's services protects 7,000 private and public companies on a daily basis with a combination of market leading anti-malware scanners and proactive heuristic scanning, enabling users to use the internet securely and productively. SoftScan enables organisations to have central control and a comprehensive overview of their internet traffic, whilst eliminating the need for additional resources to maintain and update the service.

SoftScan was established in 2003 and employs more than 150 people. Its services are sold in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the UK and Germany and are used in more than 100 countries.