It looks like the educational sector in the UK is struggling to defend itself against spammers. Apparently, schools, colleges and universities are being increasingly targeted by all sorts of rubbish junk mail, but also (rather worryingly) with DOS attacks.

Email Systems, which provides content filtering for educational organisations, said on Monday that nearly two-thirds of all emails sent to its 3,800 customers constituted spam and viruses. The company also claimed some institutions were experiencing spam levels of up to 95 percent.

Apparently, some spammers are singling out individual domain addresses and bombarding them with spam and virus-ridden email at up to 100 times the usual rate - and its schools that are getting this abuse! These sorts of institutions, which often don't have the sophisticated IT technology and staff to deal with these kinds of attacks, are often at the mercy of the spammer. It is expected that this situation will get worse this year.