Global spam levels continue to rise and phishing attacks are targeting more financial insititutions and retailers as cyber-criminals ramp up activities in the prelude to the Christmas, acoording to the MessageLabs Intelligence Report for November 2006.
Spam continues to be a major threat to all businesses with global levels reaching 74 per cent of all emails in November, an increase of 1.1 per cent on last month and the highest level observed since early 2005.
Business sector analysis by MessageLabs shows that small business employees receive almost twice as much spam messages as medium-sized companies, and 60 per cent more virus traffic than large enterprise organisations.
Mark Sunner, chief technology officer, MessageLabs said: 'The cyber criminals are out in full force and utilizing the holiday season to their advantage.'
'Whether it’s targeting smaller businesses that don’t have the IT expertise or resource to fully protect themselves from new threats, or consumers dropping their guard in exchange for retail therapy, the bad guys have an overabundance of opportunities to target,' he said.
Restricted by limited IT resources and budget and a lack of depth of security expertise, smaller companies are easier prey for cyber criminals and more likely to be deceived by sophisticated techniques and high volumes of threats.
When judged as a proportion of all email-borne threats such as viruses and trojans, the number of phishing emails has risen by 15.7 per cent, now accounting for 68.8 per cent of all the malicious emails intercepted by MessageLabs in November.
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