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Fear Mongering From IronPort?

Written by Peter Brockmann

Thursday, 06 December 2007

A recent Google Alert on spam caught my attention. I've been watching the spam and anti-spam space to capture early warning of trends and issues. In this post on itwales.com, the folks from IronPort (now Cisco) were quoted as saying that UK email accounts are attacked with 20 billion spam messages a day.

The UK is a great place, but the number of spam messages claimed by IronPort strikes me as being totally impossible to fathom, let alone believe. 20 billion every day is 600 billion a month and 7.3 trillion messages a year. For each of the 60 million citizens of the UK (Google references this estimte from the CIA), that's 121,667 messages - about 330 spam messages a day.

I find this a little hard to believe. What is IronPort's methodology is to calculate this?

This could be pre-Christmas scare mongering or it could be fact. I don't know which. Knowing the business that IronPort is in (anti-spam filtering appliances) their motives for inflating the problem could be a little suspect.

The same post also describes how spam is a $200 billion business. Cynically, I wonder if that include anti-spam product sales?