Computer Health Warning!

The enforced closure of botnets (see below) is doing little to halt the rise of spam on the internet, it has been suggested. According to the latest figures from Google's worldwide analytics, spam levels held relatively steady during the first quarter of the year, despite the closure of the Mariposa and Mega-D super-botnets.

In fact, spam volumes in quarter one were six per cent higher than in the equivalent period of 2009.

Commenting on the finding, Colin Minto, Technology Director of APA, said: "The problem is that the fundamental technology for sending email is not secure, especially in terms of authentication; that is, being able to truly validate a messages origin. People continue to click and open spurious messages and spam is still getting through, allowing users' computers to become infected and new botnets to form and grow, he explained.

Earlier this month, Symantec issued a report showing that, as of March 2010, spam comprises 89.34 per cent of all email around the world.

APA
A ‘botnet’ is a group of infected PCs that are all controlled by an external "command and control centre" and their processing power used for unauthorised purposes.