Survey shows opinion gap on spam

A study commissioned by Symantec to gauge opinion about the spam problem among IT managers and their user community points to a difference in views about how bad the volumes of unsolicited mail really are these days.

A study commissioned by Symantec to gauge opinion about the spam problem among IT managers and their user community points to a difference in views about how bad the volumes of unsolicited mail really are these days.

The survey results were released at the NetSec Conference and questioned 110 North American IT managers and 300 of their end users. The survey showed almost 80% of the IT managers regard spam as a workplace problem. However, about half the users said they didn’t see spam as a problem at all.

In addition, about 59% of the IT managers said spam has increased significantly over the last year, but only about 35% of end users felt the same. About 57% of IT managers - but about 68% of end users - said the current spam situation was under control in their organisations.

The one thing both sides seemed to be in agreement about is that they’re equally skeptical about the impact of government legislation on spam.

The wide difference in opinions between IT managers and the user population about the problem of spam caught Symantec by surprise. The survey also suggests, though, that spam takes a back seat to the threat of worms and viruses, which sometimes ride in on spam.

About 71% of end users and 82% of IT managers think worms and viruses will get worse in the future. The IT managers overwhelmingly said they consider viruses and worms the primary "message-related problem they will likely be dealing with in 2007".

The Symantec survey also asked about spam received via instant messaging, which is sometimes called spim.

About 70% of the end users said they don’t use instant messaging at work. But 22% of those who do said they do get spim regularly, with 45 of those instant messaging users reporting they’ve seen a dramatic increase in spim over the past six months.

Some end users admitted they sometimes respond to spam. While 82% of the end users claim to have never responded to an offer that came through spam, about 18% said they had done so on one or more occasions and about 7% had responded to a spam offer that turned out to be fraudulent.

From the IT manager’s point of view, spam takes up a lot of bandwidth. About 33% in IT said spam makes up between 10% and 20% of their company’s email traffic. Nearly 20% said spam accounts for between 21% and 30% of email and about 22% of IT managers said spam constitutes between 31% and 40% of the total.

About 17% of IT managers said their IT staff spends most of its time dealing with spam.

The survey also asked IT managers their views on spyware, the broad category of application programs that can do everything from track website use to report on it for marketing purposes to malicious code such as keystroke loggers that capture sensitive financial and personal information for criminal purposes. Fifty-nine percent of IT managers said spyware is a problem to their organisation’s security. About the same number also saw "phishing" - fake websites set up to capture user data, such as passwords to accounts after the user is lured to the site by fake email - as a "moderate to severe problem" that gets their attention.