BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - Lisa R. Minor used to spend so much time sifting through the volumes of spam at GHS FCU here that she often didn’t have time to read legitimate e-mails.
“That was a lot of wasted time,” said Minor, the credit union’s SVP/CTO/COO.
At the same time, Ray Rounds, VP-information services at Credit Union of Southern California in Whittier, Calif., was bristling at the amount of obscene e-mails the $530-million CU was getting.
“We were concerned not so much with the volume of spam as with the subject matter,” said Rounds.
That was nearly four years ago, and times have changed.
Today, spam is pretty much dead and buried as part of the daily work life of credit unions employees, thanks to spam-filtering technology–and spam administrators who keep their junk radars finely tuned, a number of CUs told Credit Union Journal.
That despite the fact the amount of junk mail flying around the Internet has skyrocketed, doubling in volume each year. More than 90% of all e-mail delivered to businesses is spam, according to various research firms and anti-spam software providers.
At GHS FCU, 98% of all e-mail received is spam, said Minor. That’s more than 10,000 junk e-mails per day, including virus and malware-infected messages, phishing mail and attacks. Spam volume has increased by about 20% in two years, she added.
“The total amount of spam we receive has increased significantly,” agreed Jennifer Glessing, network support technician for Vancouver, Wash.-based iQ CU.
In 2004, iQ blocked about 2000 spam messages per week. Now, however, the CU gets up to 2000 spams every day, she said.
“There’s more spam than ever, but we’re better at identifying it, trapping it and deleting it,” added Dale Debs, CIO at Cascade Community FCU in Roseburg, Ore.
Employees at the $99-million GHS FCU don’t have to deal with the bulk of spam, either. The SonicWALL Email Security solution installed last fall automatically blocks spam after analyzing the sender and content and checking it against a user database, all before it hits the CU network.
“Spam is more of an annoyance than a problem at this point,” said Minor.
What’s left is to monitor and refine the spam filter rules, said Glessing.
“Our spam filter doesn’t work perfectly, so some spam still gets through to our staff while other valid messages are blocked,” Glessing explained. “Maintaining the approved and blocked sender lists can be a challenge, especially when trying to block spammers that are using sophisticated techniques to spoof valid e-mail addresses.”
Even so, and even during international spam outbreaks, iQ employees are subject to an “insignificant” amount of spam, she said.
“We’re still thinking about it and dealing with spam on a regular basis, but there isn’t a huge problem with it,” said Glessing.
Spam volume has an inverse relationship to spam complaints, it seems. “Employee complaints were common in 2004,” Glessing said. “But as the total amount of spam that actually reaches our employees seems to have decreased, complaints about spam are now very rare.”
The $375-million iQ CU has used Postini’s spam filter, now known as Google e-mail security, since 2003.
Cascade Community also installed the Postini product, last year, but the CU has three additional, internal anti-spam products, said Debs. “I’m a redundancy freak.”
Debs said he spends about 30 seconds per day looking through his spam quarantine, where the Postini solution delivers potentially legitimate e-mail for review.
All in all, the solution probably saves each employee about one half hour every day in manually “wading through all the junk and having to look at offensive subject lines,” said Debs.
The credit unions said they pay between $2.25 and $5.00 per user, per month, for anti-spam services.
MORE
Read more about virtualization at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
Trashing Your Network Security
Best Things In IT Are Free
Taking The ‘X’ Out Of Spam
For info on this story:
* www.cascadecu.org
* www.cusocal.org
* www.ghsfcu.com
* www.iqcu.com
* www.postini.com
* www.sonicwall.com
