Mumbai: Clearswift, a US-based company that provides safe messaging services, secure boundaries and best practices, recently announced the findings of its fourth 'Spam Index', which gives in a snapshot the overall picture of the nature of spam emails on a monthly basis.

The company's findings for September 2003 show a significant increase in healthcare and fraudulent 'scam spam'. More worrying, however, is a large proportion of spam that promotes covert spying software.

Direct products remain a large chunk of all spam. However, Clearswift has identified a new entrant into the spammed products range - spy software. Following the closures of chatrooms by Microsoft, Clearswift's research department caught on to a blatant attempt to reduce the vulnerability of minors to Internet stalkers.

Hence about 15 per cent of spam email blocked overnight by Clearswift's spamActive software contained the subject line "Monitor your Kids on the Internet with Spy Software," advertising a product that allows users to spy on anyone just by sending them an e-greeting card.

Another spyware proliferating is the Lover Spy an unsolicited offer to install spyware on a remote computer by sending a person an e-greeting card, targeted at people wanting to keep tabs on spouses / partners.

Lover Spy is a programme that records the complete computer activity of a computer user, and gets installed silently as soon as the recipient opens the e-greeting card. Spyware, which is readily available, brings another potential threat - corporate espionage. Thus the company has intercepted real attempts of corporate espionage, based on emails intercepted by its customers.

Commercial spyware, such as this, is fast emerging as one of the more pernicious, generally undefended threats facing organisations, yet anti-virus software offers little or no defense. Organisations have to, therefore, deploy a multi-layered filtering solution, including real time black lists, anti-relay, domain verification and local block lists, at the network layer, combined with textual analysis and spam pattern update feeds at the content layer.

The figures, extracted from the thousands of unsolicited emails received by Clearswift on a weekly basis, are made up of spam generated by seeding email accounts and spam submissions forwarded to Clearswift by its 16 millions users.

Clearswift is a leading provider of software for managing and securing electronic communications. The company delivers capabilities for organisations to protect themselves against email and web-based threats, meet legal and regulatory requirements, implement productivity-saving policies and manage intellectual property passing through their network.