In many enterprises, spam prevention and abuse handling is a function of IT Security and less of a business duty for the email system administrators.  With that in mind, I wanted to point out something on the operational security front.

Earlier today, McAfee released their October 2009 Spam Report.  This report discusses a number of things including the continued increase in pharmaceutical spam, brand abuses, and just the overall sophistication of the spam messages we are receiving today.  Throw in all of the phishing scam messages which have been on the increase for the past 3 years, and we can see why the younger generation has all but abandoned email as a communication resource in lieu of more closed systems such as Facebook or twitter.  Those of us in higher education has been attempting to cope with this change in communication to varying degrees and expect the corporate world to have to adjust within a few years as well.

So..... thought I would point out something that may be useful for situational awareness purposes, or to at least explain to the C-level people why the spam filters missed a number of spam messages recently.

Scott Fendley ISC Handler