BANGALORE, INDIA: The volume and sophistication of attacks that threaten business e-mail networks and systems are growing at exponential rates. This growth curve poses significant problems for IT and security groups trying to manage these threats, not to mention user inboxes filled with junk that they must wade through every morning.

Recently, however, a new solution has emerged that places an additional message security layer at the network edge, significantly strengthening a company's overall messaging security posture and effectively stopping spam before it can get to your users.

But first, just how big is the spam problem, and why should you be concerned? According to recent studies, the current volume of overall e-mail sent worldwide is now over 75 billion messages per day. By 2008, this number is expected to rise to a volume of 100 billion per day or more.

About 85% of all e-mail worldwide is "unwanted," a percentage that has been growing steadily over time. Unwanted e-mail includes spam, viruses, malware, Trojans, denial-of-service, and phishing attacks. Even more troublesome is that the volume of total unwanted e-mail is doubling every six to nine months.

Threats to corporate e-mail security can be grouped into four primary categories: spam, phishing, viruses, and zombies. Spam is broadly defined as any message that is unsolicited and unwanted, or "junk mail." Phishing is a scam in which fraudsters "fish" for personal information by pretending to be a legitimate company. Viruses come in many forms.

Some are intended merely to cause a nuisance and block network traffic temporarily, while others, such as Trojans, contains or installs a malicious program or payload.

And zombies are the newest threat to enterprise network security. A zombie PC is one that has been taken over by a remote hacker through the use of Trojans, which are files that appear to be legitimate but instead are viruses that hijack a PC and use it to send spam, viruses, DoS attacks and phishing scams.

These zombie machines are networked and used in conjunction with each other to send thousands of messages each, often targeting specific entities.

While each of these categories poses a unique threat to e-mail security, many attacks combine several elements to exploit multiple vulnerabilities simultaneously, adding to the problem.

Detecting Spam

Unwanted e-mail is also becoming more difficult to detect, mainly because attackers are professionals with the budget and technical prowess to develop spam, phishing attacks, viruses, and zombies that can get through existing filters. Gone are the days of lone hackers working late at night. Many of these hackers run teams of engineers with very sophisticated equipment and technology.

Fact is, professional hacking teams typically have all the same security software that corporations do, and will constantly test their strategies to see if they can outsmart the filters. One example of this is hash busting text, where spammers will have their zombie networks send out e-mails that are each unique and cannot be recognized with a hash.