PineApp survey highlights growing threat from image based spam

A survey by PineApp of 400 medium to large organisations in the UK has found that whilst 97% have anti-spam solutions, half of the respondents complained that they were not dealing effectively with the growing problem of image based spam.

And with image spam now accounting for up to 50% of all spam, this lack of protection poses a serious threat to businesses.

The PineApp survey also highlights two major new problems caused by the inability to cope with image based spam; the burden on bandwidth and storage. This is because a typical image-based spam message is more than three times larger than that of a regular spam message.

In fact, 48% or respondents said bandwidth is a real resource problem while 37% said that the amount of storage taken up by image spam is a major concern.

Other issues included end user frustration (44%), increased exposure to malware (42%), loss of productivity (36%) and legal consequences (32%). What's more, 27% of respondents stated that they found all of these posed a problem, with only 1% claiming that image-based spam presented no problems at all.