from the Seattle Post Microsoft blog:
What percentage of e-mail messages are unwanted or harassing?
According to a Microsoft Security Report published Wednesday: Almost all of them.
More than 97 percent of e-mail messages are spam, contain malicious attachments or are sent as part of a phishing attack, the report said.
In the second half of 2008, spam was dominated by product advertisements. Nearly half, or 48.6 percent, of the spam was for pharmaceutical products.
The report also found that attackers increasingly target common file formats to exploit systems, such as files created by Microsoft Office or Adobe PDFs.
“The most frequently-exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office software were also some of the oldest,” the report said. “91.3 percent of attacks examined exploited a single vulnerability for which a security fix had been available for more than 2 years.”
It was a great tool. Our company relies on it for communicating with our subscribers, and staying smart about it is a challenge.