FrontBridge, which provides outsourced e-mail filtering services for companies, said this week that it detected a 15 percent increase in spam between the 14th and 18th October--which it believes is a sign that organized spammers are ratcheting up their activities.
"Users who until this point had remained spam-free are now reporting multiple messages per day," said Craig Whitney, FrontBridge's European director. "This latest jump in the volume of spam being generated just adds to the load that enterprises have to manage every day," Whitney added.
This mid-October surge in spam activity could mean that some of the most determined and active spammers have added many more e-mail addresses to the lists that they use when sending their unsolicited e-mails.
Other experts, though, believe that the anti-spam industry should be able to combat the threat.
"We often see spikes in the spam load that last a few days. This may be attributed to one such spike," Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at Messagelabs, told ZDNet UK. "Generally these do not last, as it is very difficult to sustain these kinds of attack levels without getting noticed. The general trend for spam, though, is definitely on the up, with our latest figures showing that 50.5 percent of all e-mail is now spam."
FrontBridge has also announced that it is targeting the European enterprise market by launching a Euro HQ in London. Through this, it hopes to persuade more companies to sign up for its managed e-mail security services, which it claims can save a company £71 per user per year.
