Air Mobility Command's fight against spam Published Nov. 8, 2006 SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. -- This year Air Mobility Command has witnessed a global increase in the volume of spam traffic circulating the Internet. In August 2006, global e-mail volume was estimated at 50 billion messages per day, a figure that is expected to rise to 100 billion messages per day by 2008. Additionally, global spam volumes have tripled over the past year. E-mail recipients have noticed that many of the spam messages seen today are image-based spam (stock tips, pharmaceutical advertisements, etc.). On a typical day, image spam comprises 30 percent of all spam that transverses the Internet and at peak times comprises in excess of 90 percent. Spam images are highly randomized, with different sizes, colors and backgrounds, and they are being sent out by botnets (a collection of software robots) consisting of tens of thousands of "zombies," which are compromised PCs used for spewing spam, viruses and phishing attacks. This Internet-wide situation has created two issues within AMC's environment: 1) User perception that spam effectiveness has decreased because of the increase in inbound spam messages or that mail gateways are not effective against image spam; and 2) Traffic overload on the email gateways since the volume is significantly larger than when the anti-spamming appliances were initially deployed. Anti-spamming appliances have been in place for more than a year to combat spam and virus-infected e-mails coming into and leaving the AMC domain. AMC customers can be assured that Enterprise Messaging technicians are gearing up to combat this newly evolving threat to legitimate e-mail traffic.Users receiving spam messages should report the incident to their client support administator.