FBI investigation into UK paedophiles raises issue of pornographic junk mail within UK enterprises

Spammers wise-up to outdated anti-spam technology, leaving companies at risk, warns Nexor

7 August 2002 – Ineffective anti-spam solutions and outdated email usage policies are leaving many UK enterprises vulnerable to pornographic and paedophilic bulk emails warns Nexor, a provider of high-tolerance messaging and directory solutions. The warning comes after reports that the FBI has launched an investigation into over 7,000 British Internet users who have accessed known paedophile websites in the US. The investigation coincides with Nexor’s own research which shows an alarming increase in the number of unsolicited pornographic emails being sent to UK employees.

Nexor warns UK businesses that employees responding to such emails, and accessing illegal content from their workplace, could leave a company open to investigation. Nexor believes many anti-spam solutions are ineffective in stopping a large percentage of unsolicited mails reaching the desktop.

'Because all email addresses within a company usually follow the same mail format, a spammer can target an entire organisation with just a staff list and a single employee email address,' explains Liz Thomas, VP Marketing at Nexor. 'A report from research company Jupiter claims that spam is likely to increase 22-fold to 268 billion emails by 2005 and the EU believes that engines capable of sending 100 million messages per day are being developed. Many organisations are using anti-spam technology that is two or three years old and, unfortunately, many of these solutions just aren’t capable of handling the increased volume of mail passing through corporate servers.'

To beat the control systems that organisations have implemented, spammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their approach. Standard methods for spam control rely on key-word searches and referral to real-time black hole lists that compile lists of known spammers. Spammers are aware of these methods and are developing ways to beat them.

'Organisations need to look at more sophisticated ways of controlling emails,' continues Thomas. 'Solutions such as Nexor Interceptor identify the content of emails based upon the natural language concepts contained within them, and not keywords. This server-based product automatically opens and reads email sent to an organisation. The messages are then analysed using knowledge management software from Autonomy, which applies sophisticated pattern-matching techniques and neural network technology to enable Nexor Interceptor to understand the context of information contained in an email. This enables spam email control to go beyond keywords and identify concepts in the information, blocking or distributing the email as appropriate. The system has the ability to learn from experience in order to increase accuracy in the identification of spam email for the future.'

Nexor has published a white paper to help organisations manage junk email and understand current control mechanisms.

For further information, please info [at] nexor [dot] com (subject: Nexor%20Press%20Release) (contact Wendy Draper )