A column over at TechWeb claims that the number one threat to internet users in the upcoming 2004 year is a spam-virus marriage. Spam is expected to move from about 50% of all emails send today to around 70% sent in the following year. One company reports that it now catches an average of 27 spam emails per second, up from two per second at this time last year. Folks, that's 2,332,000 emails of spam PER DAY! and 851,472,000 emails PER YEAR! These numbers are incredible, and this is only one company.

"The Minneapolis-based company, which filters corporate e-mail for spam and viruses, intercepts about 27 spam messages a second today, up from two per second at the same time last year. Sixty-six percent of those messages are generated from PCs that have been taken over by spammers without the knowledge of the computers' owners, Mark Sunner, chief technology officer for MessageLabs, said."