Spam falls back from December's high

Statistics just in from SoftScan show that levels of spam are are at last falling from a massive high in December, but they are still - for January at least - around an astonishing 96.8 per cent of all email scanned by the company.

My own view is that these stats are way too high, but SoftScan specialises in this area, so it may be that its customers - who are companies - are being targeted by spammers.

According to SoftScan, although some of the reduction is due to bot infected machines being replaced with new and `clean' PCs at Christmas, the company says it does not believe that the remaining drop is significant - more a lull before the next surge of spam.

Diego d'Ambra, SoftScan's CTO, says that, either the spammers are content with the data they have collected so far and don't see the need for sending large waves of spam or they are busy working on new tactics.

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"Although we don't expect to see a return to December's levels just yet, I'm sure it will only be a matter of months," he said.

 Myself, I have my doubts. The efficacy of spam in terms of revenue generation for the low lifes that generate it is falling, so I reckon that the companies that sponsor these spam attacks are moving into new areas of revenue generation.

Which is no bad thing, in my humble opinion...