We’ve recently been cranking out the monthly “State of Spam” reports which you can find here. They are a really strong demonstration of the kind of work that goes on behind the scene by humans in our operations centres around the world.
According to the report the volumes of spam have recently risen to peaks of 87% globally. However I’ve seen a few snapshots from dashboards that customers have sent our team recently showing 98.2% over a period of a week! I repeat … 98.2%! Just think about the volume of email the hits your inbox legitimately on a daily basis and imagine that’s less than 2% of the volume your organisation is processing for you!
One of the great things I love about the Symantec Brightmail technology that drives the anti-spam products I work with is the mix of humans and technology. It’s almost like bionic man (or woman) in someways. The reason I know that the human-machine mix works so well was the tweaks they’ve done in the last month to slow very effectively the NDR (Non Delivery Report) attacks that were happening. The volumes dropped significantly without a patch or new release of software etc. It was done through crafting rulesets that were deployed automagically to our customers. I was saying to one of our Product Managers, Jason, that it’s a shame we currently don’t have a really effective way to let our customers know what we are doing on their behalf but I think we’re we’re looking into some sort of a direct news feed to our customers in the upcoming dashboards. We could send them an email but it might get marked as spam and as far as I know we’re not hard-coded a whitelist entry of “*@symantec.com”!
I should be getting a tour of one our operations centre’s in Dublin later this month and I’ll try and write up a bit more if they let me.