The Rising Tide of Spam Means A Flood Of Costs and Risks For Today’s Organizations

A recent SurfControl survey of more than 700 IT professionals showed that 25 percent of all e-mail received by many American companies is spam and other electronic junk.

Spam increases the risk of legal liability, hogs bandwidth, undermines productivity, and wastes valuable network resources. Despite the threat of tougher legislation and stiffer financial penalties, the spam coming across networks costs companies millions. More ingenious spamming methods, combined with an increasing use of e-mail in the workplace, have dramatically increased the volume and variety of spam that needs to be managed daily.

As organizations around the world look for an effective solution, new kinds of junk e-mail threats have emerged that can be just as costly as their traditional counterparts. Junk e-mail sent to the workplace by well-meaning family and friends can have the same harmful effect as the most professionally orchestrated commercial spam campaign. Every single week, employees receive up to 30 chain letters, jokes, video clips or similar e-mail messages from someone they know according to the SurfControl Survey. This means many employees may be dealing with more than 1,500 pieces of junk e-mail each year from people they know.

To fight the spam menace, organizations need to understand how it is evolving. They must change their response to it and look to more powerful and sophisticated technologies for a solution.

SurfControl E-mail Filter along with the optional Anti-Spam Agent has multiple layers of security for unparalleled spam protection. SurfControl's Anti-Spam Agent is a powerful option that protects an organization from spam and junk mail. Anti-Spam Agent's unique digital fingerprint filtering ensures near 100% accuracy and manages spam by text and multiple file types, including JPEGs, MPEGs and others. This digital fingerprint or anti-spam signature approach reduces time and resources in reviewing false triggers and provides scaling performance. In addition to the Anti-Spam Agent, SurfControl offers other critical layers of enhanced spam protection. They include intelligent content and digital signature recognition, a spam dictionary, reverse DNS lookup and HTML stripping capabilities. SurfControl also uses an advanced technology known as Adaptive Reasoning Technology (ART) to apply the power and flexibility of neural networks to the challenge of content filtering.

To help manage spam within an organization, we offer these tips for network administrators:

1) Tell users never to respond to spam e-mail messages. Sending a reply, even if it's a request to be taken off a list, confirms a user at an address and encourages the spammer to send more mail.

2) Tell employees not to forward on junk e-mail messages to other coworkers.

3) Include guidance in your Acceptable Use Policy forbidding employee use of their company email addresses when surfing or shopping online.

4) Subscribe to "real time black hole" list services that block delivery of e-mails from known spammers.

5) Subscribe to a Signature Database List, like SurfControl E-mail Filter's unique Anti-Spam Agent, which prevents the delivery of known spam and other digital junk. And make sure you update the subscription list regularly to ensure the most complete protection.

6) Install content filtering tools that scan and block e-mail messages that include suspect text like 'Get Rich Quick' or similar subject words and phrases, and those with multiple forwards or huge distribution lists.
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