Why You Should Take Spam Email Seriously

There can hardly be a person who has used a computer in the last ten years who hasn’t received a spam email at some point or another. For most of us, this is a daily occurrence, a nuisance that can be filed alongside the daily commute and packaging that won’t open properly. It rarely occurs to many of us why we receive so much spam. While it is pretty obvious that there is a basic commercial imperative behind a lot of spam, why is this particular marketing technique so prevalent in the modern world?

Quite simply…because it works! Pitching goods via spam earns the people engaged in it hundreds of millions of dollars per business per year, while the cost and time involved in sending spam is somewhere between negligible and non-existent.

Yet the amount of money spent on fending off unwanted spam emails is astronomical in comparison the amount of money that the process generates. While the estimated annual earnings related to spam are said to be around $200 million, in the region of $20 billion per year is spent on preventing spam email getting through to inboxes all over the world.

Of course, not all spam is legitimate, far from it. It’s hard to put a precise percentage figure on it, but a very significant proportion of spam email is targeted ‘phishing’ intended to fraudulently gather personal information about an individual or organization.

RSA, the security division of the EMC Corporation, has studied phishing in depth and found that in 2012 alone there was an average of over 37,000 separate phishing attacks identified by this company alone per month. On this evidence provided by this study, there must be millions of phishing attacks taking place on a yearly basis.

Naturally, the impact on the global economy and businesses of all this phishing has been pretty significant. RSA estimated that worldwide losses from phishing attacks amounted to more than $1.5 billion in 2012; not a number to be sniffed at.

With this in mind, it is of critical importance for businesses to be aware of security issues related to phishing. Firstly, it is important to make staff aware of the dangers. Secondly, some appropriate security provisions should be put in place. And, thirdly, this issue should be allocated associated importance within every company. It could literally save your business thousands of dollars.

For more information on how you can keep your business safe with Managed Email Filtering and Continuity, contact Thrive Networks today.