Microsoft's Security and Intelligence Report

Microsoft has recently released its Security and Intelligence Report for January - June 2008.   The report contains a lot of data from Hotmail but also from us in Exchange Hosted Services.  The full report with supporting data can be found here, and then you need to download the file named Microsoft_Security_Intelligence_Report_v5.pdf (it's a 12 MB file). 

Alternatively, you can download the summary, but I wouldn't recommend that.  The reason is that yours truly, ie, me, is a contributor to this report.  Most of it is Hotmail centric, but not everything.  Some of it applies to the enterprise, particularly those in Exchange Hosted Services.  Specifically, I provided the data on page 67.  Here is a breakdown of our spam distribution for the first half of the year categorized by type of spam:

Pharma-spam continues to dominate the spam landscape.  Sexually explicit spam is a minor player and that represents a reversal from when I first broke into the industry 4 years ago when it was a much larger player.

I would have expected stock spam to be a lot more dominant, but I guess the stock market woes along with the SEC clamping down more on stock scams has contributed to the decline in this type of spam.

Over the next few posts, maybe not consecutively, I will highlight and comment on some key findings from Microsoft's report.