Spam caused more economic damage than hackers and viruses last month, despite indications that the amount of unwanted e-mail actually declined. London-based computer-security firm mi2G said in a report on Thursday that computer outages and lost productivity because of spam led to $10.4 billion in worldwide economic losses in October. Meanwhile, the company said viruses and worms caused $8.4 billion in losses, while hackers contributed to $1 billion in financial damage worldwide. "In the beginning, we thought that hackers were more damaging than malware, and malware was more damaging than spam," said DK Matai, executive chairman of mi2G, in a press release. "October has shown the reverse to be true." Brightmail, a Los Altos, Calif.,-based developer of spam filters, said it scanned about 70 billion e-mail messages in October, and 52 percent were identified as spam. In September, 54 percent of messages scanned were spam.
| I've had Outlook running all weekend. There are 479 messages in my Deleted box, all of it spam. Most of it's intercepted by SpamAssassin — which I heartily recommend — but I still end up seeing more ads to stretch my doinker or make me rich than I do real messages. |
In recent months, antispam groups and operators of "blocklists" that identify spammers have been subjected to massive spam attacks that flood servers and crash computer systems. These attacks have forced some blocklists to shut down, and many have had to spend thousands of dollars in extra bandwidth and protection. |