Businesses targeted by spam emails

Only one in every 28 emails sent to businesses are legitimate, according to new research that may alarm Welsh firms.

According to a quarterly report from IT security company Sophos, spam accounted for 96.5 per cent of all business email in June, compared to 92.3 per cent in the first three months of the year.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said: "If your company is on the internet, it's going to be hard for it to do business unless it has an effective anti-spam defence in place.

"Otherwise the amount of junk mail will be swamping legitimate correspondence from your customers and suppliers."

The report also found that cyber criminals are increasingly using social networking sites to distribute fake links as anti-spam software hampers their ability to infiltrate corporate inboxes.

Research by business security services provider MessageLabs found global proportion of spam in email traffic from new or previously unknown sources stood at 76.5 per cent in June 2008 - the equivalent of one spam message in every 1.31 emails.

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