Spam emails to Irish climb 63%

THE rate of spam, or junk emails, targeting Irish email users climbed to 63.28% in January, according to email security company, IE Internet. However, the instances of email-based computer viruses remain quite low.

“The spam problem is certainly not diminishing. To put it into context, in 2004 the rate of spam for the whole year did not exceed 30%. In only four years, we have seen a doubling of that rate,” said IE Internet chief technical officer Ken O’Driscoll.

The US remains top of the spam league table, contributing 43.18% of all spam detected in January. For the first time, Germany came in a surprise second with 39.77%. Other significant sources included Poland and France. Email-based virus threats continued to stay relatively low at 4.17%.