Report: Spam Increases During Holiday Season

With the holiday season upon us, there has been a significant increase in the amount of global spam, according to a report by Marshals Threat Research and Content Engineering team.

According to Marshal, leading the way in this global spam trend are China and South Korea, as China ranks second to South Korea in generating phishing e-mails.

The report indicated that since Thanksgiving, phishing e-mails have increased from 0.4 percent of all spam to a peak of 2.2 percent in early December.

“Beginning around Thanksgiving and continuing until New Years, we see a rise in Christmas spam,” Penny Freeman, director of sales engineering for Marshal, in a release Dec. 11.

Using Marshals Spam Volume Index , the TRACE team found that the Christmas season lends to an abundance of spam, with 10.9 percent of all spam found to be Christmas-related, including Christmas gift ideas.

“It happens every year,” Freeman said. “By using the hottest, hard-to-find toys for Christmas to grab attention, consumers and employees shopping online, looking for gift ideas and receiving e-cards, are more likely to open the message.”

To combat this increasing spam problem, Marshal is offering an e-mail security and management platform, also known as MailMarshal, which provides customers with SpamCensor anti-spam technology that helps identify spam.

The spam tool also allows customers to use anti-spam settings on e-mails that come from different countries, helping users to be more precise when it comes to managing spam and to thwart e-mails from countries that they do not normally do business with.

Marshals TRACE team sends its MailMarshal users updates to aid in the catching of the latest variations of spam and other e-mail threats, while the teams Web site gives customers statistics and other information on spam, phishing, viruses and other security threats.

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