Websites linked to online gaming make up less than four per cent of world spam emails, according to new research published by Websense Security Labs.
A recent report from the US-based internet security firm states that the second half of 2007 saw a large increase in Storm attacks, which are a combination of worms, Trojan Horses, bots and spam agents.
Storm attacks are well planned, resilient and difficult for firewalls to prevent. As a result, the attacks infected millions of machines worldwide, exposing millions of users and organisations without adequate protection.
During the second half of 2007, Websense said that web attacks continued to increase and evolve as more and more legitimate websites were compromised by attackers. It was found that more than 18 per cent of all websites were created or compromised using professional toolkits widely available online.
Websense’s ThreatSeeker technology scans more than 600 million websites per week, searching for malicious code. In addition, the company’s Hosted Email Security system scans more than 350 million emails per week looking for email security threats.
In the last six months of 2007, ThreatSeeker determined that 87 per cent of email messages sent worldwide were spam. Of this number, however, just 3.84 per cent were linked to online gambling websites.
