Spam soars: junk email up over 50%

RECORD amounts of spam are finding their way into Irish email accounts — it leapt by over 50% last year and is set to get worse in 2007.

Ireland’s foremost hosting company IE Internet said last year there was a 52% increase in the number of junk-mails it had to block on behalf 35,000 business email users.

Yesterday it released its third annual report when its Chief technical officer Ken O’Driscoll said spamming techniques were getting more sophisticated and difficult to stop.

“What you have at the moment is a cold war situation where spammers are finding new ways to get past traditional filters and we are having to react and improve our systems. They are using more advanced technology, putting text into images so filters cannot read them. We introduced optical readers and now they are using unusual fonts which are more difficult to detect.”

Mr O’Driscoll said as the technology was evolving it became more important for governments to combat spammers with legislation.

In addition to spamming scourges, IE Internet said 2006 also saw an increase in the number of viruses in circulation.