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AVP: Why Sobig is bad for privacy and AV vendors |
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By John Leyden
Posted: 27/08/2003 at 12:00 GMT
Eight years ago when I first used the Internet, while doing support work in a Manchester cyber café, email was a joy.
I could contact my friends, even when they were on the other side of the world, on the click of a mouse. It was so much easier and cheaper than the alternatives - snail mail or the phone.
Email is still an enormously useful as a journalist (not least as an important source of news leads) and but this is being undermined the increased prevalence of spam and viral messages.
Drowning in malicious code
Email services firms such as MessageLabs and Brightmail will tell you that one in two emails is now junk email. At The Register this figure is more like four in five emails, and that was before the recent outbreak of Sobig-F.Currently the ratio of legitimate email to malicious junk is approximately two in 100. Clearing out my email inbox is becoming a near Herculean task.
Outsourced security
To get around the junk mail overload, home users can use tools such as Spam Assassin or Mailwasher while small businesses can use managed services like MessageLabs, Avecho.com, intY and the rest.
With Spam Assassin - the most accurate anti-spam package we've found so far - you still have download email, so if you get sent in excess of 3,000 copies or bounced messages over the weekend (a real figure for us here) that's still a problem.
And if you use managed services (which alleviate the bandwidth headache) then privacy is undermined. By definition you have to trust a third-party - an undesirable consequences of using services that do reduce the signal to noise ratio of email traffic down to sensible proportions.
The emerging breed of anti-virus firewalls and all-in one security appliances enable larger businesses to tackle the problem in-house but these are prohibitively expensive forhome users and many SMEs.
Source: The Register (UK)
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