Spammers Ramping Stocks And Shares For Financial Gain

Clearswift publishes findings of its March Spam Index

London, UK – April 14th 2004: Clearswift, the MIMEsweeper company, today announces the findings of its latest ‘Spam Index’, designed to give a snapshot picture of the nature of spam emails on a monthly basis. The analysis uncovered a large number of bogus financial tips, which suggests that spammers are attempting to ramp up the value of certain stocks by persuading the easily led to invest in them.

By implying that the recipients of these spam emails are in possession of privileged information, such as news of an acquisition before general announcement, the spammers are able to persuade their victims into purchasing particular stocks. By provoking a significant enough number of people to invest in a penny stock (i.e. a stock with a small market capitalisation), the spammer may be able to increase the price of the stock so that existing shareholders can sell their shares at a profit.

While pharmaceutical spam still dominates the Spam Index with 57%, financial spam rose from 10.8% to 26%, largely due to the growing problem of bogus stock tips. The proliferation of the these emails suggests that they are creating revenues for the spammers, and demonstrates just how vulnerable people are to the offer of quick financial gain.

Alyn Hockey, Clearswift’s Director of Research, comments, “It is hard to believe that spammers can influence stock market prices but they wouldn’t be sending these emails unless there was something it for them. Perhaps the pick up in the economy is tempting the uneducated investor to have a flutter. I would advise people to be extremely dubious of any claims made in emails unless they come from a trusted source.”

Clearswift’s recently launched MAILsweeper Business Suite combines comprehensive email content security, self-learning anti-spam software, and remote management functionality, which allows multiple email administrators to investigate quarantined emails remotely via a web-based interface. This solution enables organisations to protect themselves from fraudulent spam, as well as other email threats such viruses, spyware, pornography, lost productivity, damage to reputation, loss of confidential information and network congestion.

The figures, which were extracted from the thousands of unsolicited emails received by Clearswift on a weekly basis, are made up of spam generated by seeding email accounts and spam submissions forwarded to Clearswift by its 20 million users.

About Clearswift

Clearswift simplifies content security.

Our products help organizations enforce best-practice email and web use, ensuring all traffic complies with internal policy and external regulations.

Our range of content filtering solutions makes it easy to deploy, manage and maintain no-compromise email and web security for both inbound and outbound traffic.

Clearswift is the only vendor to offer comprehensive, policy-based content security in all three deployment methods: as software, as an appliance and as a managed service.

All three platforms are designed to take the hassle out of securing internet traffic, with a clear, intuitive management interface; automatic, 'zero-touch' updates; powerful reporting and common-sense policy management.

Twenty years of experience across 17,000 organizations has helped us raise security standards while simplifying security management at the same time.

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