Within the past week or so, Commtouch and Akonix issued reports – one about the year just past and one about predictions for 2007. Here are some highlights:

* Commtouch found that on a typical day, there are 8 million active zombie computers, accounting for 85% of all spam currently sent over the Internet. If we very conservatively assume that each one delivers only five spam messages each hour, that’s close to 1 billion spams delivered every day. However, botnets of zombies can send a billion messages in far less than a day.

* While, on average, 87% of e-mail is spam, this masks the enormous increase in the absolute volume of spam sent over the Internet – Commtouch found that spam increased by 30% during 2006 compared to 2005. Between May and November, Postini reported that the quantity of spam approximately doubled.

* Spam, driven in large part by image-based spam, accounts for 1.7 quadrillion bytes of storage and bandwidth per day. That's the equivalent of 1.1 billion 1.5Mb DSL connections operating 24/7.

* Akonix found that in 2006 spyware, worms and other instant messaging-borne threats grew at an annual rate of 92% – the company is predicting that 2007 will see at least the same rate of growth in attacks against IM targets. The company identified 406 unique IM threats during 2006.

* Akonix anticipates that we will see many more hostile workplace lawsuits and similar actions because of unfettered use of IM – an Akonix survey found that more than one-third of employees have been harassed or threatened via an IM client while at work.

In short, these reports don’t paint a rosy future for e-mail or IM use during the new year, but they do underscore the critical nature of securing messaging systems from the growing array of threats coming our way. To address some of these issues, Osterman Research and Messaging News are sponsoring a Webinar on image-based spam Jan. 10. To sign up for this no-cost event, please click here.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.