Cisco says that 90 percent of email is spam

A CISICO REPORT claims that more than 90 per cent of the email flowing around the net is spam created by armies of zombie botnets.

Cisco chief security researcher Patrick Peterson said that every year Cisco sees the hackers get more cunning as they come up with new ways to exploit people, networks and the Internet.

The report said that there are more than 200 billion spam messages sent every day which is about 90 per cent of all email.

Most of the spam comes from the United States because there are more victims of the hackers in that country and consequently more members of botnets. More than 17.2 per cent of the messages come from the Land of the Free. Turkey came second with 9.2 per cent and Russia third with eight per cent, Cisco said. Turkey and Russia are high because spammers use servers that are based in those countries.

The report said that cyber criminals were turning their botnets on web-based email accounts in bid to find weak passwords. Once this is managed, spam is sent under the hijacked account owner's name.

Cisco thinks that the spammers have had to do this as security vendors got better at protecting machines from hackers and users grow wary of clicking on unsolicited Web links or email attachments. µ

L'Inq
AP