May of 2006 gave us not one, but two new email records. The first record may surprise you a bit. Emails containing malicious programs (viruses) reached an all time low, accounting for a minute 0.73% of total email traffic, according to the figures released by the security firm, BlackSpider Technologies. On the flip side, however, spam mail accounted for 87.4% of email traffic, also setting a new record, albeit not as positive of a record as the first.
There is an explanation behind the abnormally high spam record, though. In the UK, between May 21 and 23, over 250 million spam emails were sent by computers that had previously been infected by a virus. Combine that with the recent controversial shutdown of Blue Security, and we have one huge reminder that the spam problem continues to worsen, seemingly with each day that passes.