Small and medium-sized businesses in the fight against spam

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are structures with fewer than 500 employees. Despite their small size, they are not immune to all kinds of computer attacks: spam, viruses, scams, denial-of-service attacks, phishing, etc. To guard against this, SMEs are not hesitating to invest heavily in effective security measures. Some even consider this investment a priority.

The threats most feared by SMEs

For SMEs, there are a number of man-made and natural threats to their information systems that call for proper protection. Loss of valuable data, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, cyber-attacks, spam, etc. are among the threats most feared by SMEs. While 7 out of 10 companies have already been victims of an Internet attack, 3 of them have suffered a loss of confidential data. The budget invested in data security is therefore not negligible for SMEs. These figures have been drawn from a vast global study carried out by an IT security giant in 28 countries.

What does spam mean for SMEs?

Even if spam doesn’t pose a real threat to SMEs, it does tend to saturate networks, monopolize connection times and impair employee concentration. In 2003, 24% of e-mails received by companies worldwide were spam. For businesses, spam represents a huge cost in terms of processing and protecting infrastructure, as well as lost productivity.

Integrating SMEs into a spammer’s email list

Spammers have no shortage of resources when it comes to collecting the email addresses they need to launch their spamming campaigns. They can, for example, buy or exchange e-mail addresses, use bots, collect addresses in a chat room, launch a chain message, use a virus, reconstitute e-mail addresses, and so on. Once in the spammers’ crosshairs, the only way to counter spam for SMEs is to set up an effective, up-to-date spam filter.

The various spam filtering techniques available on the market

The proliferation of spam on SME networks could be brought under control with the advent of highly-developed filtering technologies. A number of techniques have already proved effective. This is the case, for example, with sender filters or DNS Blackhole List. As soon as unwanted mail appears on the horizon, the spam filter for SMEs adds the sender’s email address to the blacklist. In future, all e-mails from this address will be automatically blocked. The disadvantage of this solution is that some SMEs find themselves unknowingly blacklisted. As a result, all their emails risk being treated as spam and rejected by their recipients.

Other filtering solutions focus on e-mail content. These include keyword filtering, signature filtering, heuristics, Bayesian filtering, reputation filtering and the Sender Genotype detection technique. They are available from protection software suppliers and can be adapted to the characteristics of each SME.