The vast majority of IT directors are reporting significant increases in email spam, and 20% say there has been an increase of more than 100% over the last year.
That’s among key findings of a survey of 460 IT directors, managers and administrators by network management, secure file transfer and messaging solutions firm Ipswitch.
IT managers also say there’s been an average of 30 infections of viruses, worms or Trojans over the past 12 months, as well as 22 incidents of spyware or key logger installations.
“The amount of spam arriving in corporate inboxes shows no sign of waning, and IT managers must be prepared to take decisive steps to deal with this problem,” says Tripp Allen, Ipswitch president. “The importance of having an efficient antispam filter that is flexible, extensible and capable of providing automatic updates 24x7, is now more important than ever since infections can be costly to deal with.”
According to those surveyed, the total cost of defending against these threats averaged more than $13,000 annually when factoring in the costs of technology, staff, recovery, remediation and user training.
At the same time, the respondents indicated that the total annual cost of damages caused by e-mail related events, including lost productivity, staff time and fines related to compliance, averaged $5,600.
IT managers rated white lists and black lists as the most important spam control tools, with 56% rating both as ‘very important’. Free real-time blackhole lists (RBLS) were also rated as ‘very important’ by 37% of IT managers, while challenge/response systems were ranked the same by 21%. Subscription RBLS was the least-used tool, with only 15% rating it as ‘very important’ and 18% rating it as ‘not important’.
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