ENISA Spam Survey 2009

Status Report of the Fight Against Spam in Europe

BRUSSELS and HERAKLION, Greece, January 21, 2010 -- The EU cybersecurity Agency - ENISA (the European Network and Information Security Agency) presents its new, 3rd spam report, i.e. anti-spam measures implemented by European Internet service providers (ISPs).

The report looks at spam budgets, impact of spam and spam management. No significant progress is reported in the fight against spam.

The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries, throughout the EU (26 /27 EU Member States); and 80 million mailboxes managed. The survey analyses how e-mail service providers combat spam in their networks, and identifies the state of art in the fight against spam. Some of the key findings are:

- Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. [This
means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam.]This is a very minor
change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports.

- 70% of respondents consider spam extremely significant or significant
for their security operations.

- Over 1/4 of respondents had spam accounting for >10% of helpdesk calls.

- Among very small providers, 1/4 of respondents allocate anti-spam
budgets of over EUR10,000 per year.

- 1/3 of very large providers dedicate anti-spam budgets >EUR 1 Mn/year.

- Fighting spam has reached a certain level of maturity.

- ISPs are using various kinds of measures: technical, awareness,
policies and legal framework. Blacklists are the most commonly used
anti-spam tool. On average 5 kinds of measures are used.

- ISPs consider spam prevention as a competitive advantage to attract and
retain customers. However, spam is not a critical factor.

The Executive Director of ENISA, Dr Udo Helmbrecht concludes: "Spam remains an unnecessary, time consuming and costly burden for Europe. Given the number of spam messages observed, I can only conclude more dedicated efforts must be undertaken.

Email providers should be better at monitoring spam and identifying the source. Policy-makers and regulatory authorities should clarify the conflicts between spam-filtering, privacy, and obligation to deliver."

Next steps: ENISA will deliver a report on botnets to study root causes of spam by the end of 2010. Botnets are networks of thousands of remotely controlled computers, secretly infected by malicious programs "bots", for distributing spam and criminal activities.

Download the full survey ( http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/res/other-areas/anti-spam-measures) and slides (http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/res/other-areas/anti-spam-measures/studie...).

Source: ENISA - European Network and Information Security Agency