Spam Spam Spam Spam

Symantec has released its latest Internet Security Threat Report. Interestingly, the press release--and the Symantec site--provide no information on how to actually get the full report. Perhaps it's a report that only exists as a press release. Anyway, one line stuck out:

Symantec also observed that spam made up 61 percent of all e-mail traffic and that 51 percent of all spam received worldwide originated in the United States.

More unnerving data:

[P]hishing attacks continue to proliferate. The volume of phishing messages grew from an average of 2.99 million messages a day to 5.70 million. One out of every 125 e-mail messages scanned by Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam was a phishing attempt, an increase of 100 percent from the last half of 2004. Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam antifraud filters were blocking more than 40 million phishing attempts per week on average, up from approximately 21 million per week at the beginning of January.

Phishing is of course the process by which scammers send users e-mail messages purportedly from their bank (or some other such institution) and ask them to fill in account numbers and other confidential information, which the scammers then use nefariously. (I've received these, mostly from "banks" located nowhere near me, which immediately made me suspicious.) Needless to say, a legitimate bank or credit card company will never send you messages asking for your account info.

Still, lest this sound like the usual "Oh, it's a Big Scary Internet, be afraid!" kind of thing the media loves to propagate, the Internet is no more scary or nefarious than the so-called "real world." Probably the most you can say is that both on- and offline realms are equally annoying in their own unique ways.