Sunderland football club has improved its network security to control spam and protect staff from offensive content.

The club has installed a unified threat management system from Network Box to address spiralling levels of spam.

It has also been used to help the club defend itself against a distributed denial of service (Ddos) attack which Graham Stenning, Sunderland’s systems administrator, says would have previously shut down its server.

‘At one point we received 100,000 emails a week and 85 per cent of these were spam,’ he said. ‘We had to delete these manually from a separate spam-filtered mail box, and some still got through to the main mail box. This was taking up valuable time and effort to control.’

Stenning says the club has observed changes in the type of attack it is being subjected to.

‘We are not seeing as many viruses sent to us as we used to, but phishing attacks have drastically increased,’ he said.

‘Of 195,000 emails we received recently, 173,000 were spam, 4,772 were blocked viruses and 3,448 were purely phishing emails. From practically none to 3,448 in just a matter of months is an astonishing rise.’

Figures released last week by banking industry body Apacs show that phishing attacks reached a record high last year, rising from 1,714 in 2005 to 14,156 in 2006.

Peter Cassidy, secretary general of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, says the increase in phishing emails being sent to businesses is not surprising.

‘There is no simple solution to make it all go away, but making sure people don’t receive these emails is a good start,’ he said.