McAfee reports on spam in the real world

Taking a cue from Morgan Spurlock who lived on fast food for 30 days in the Super Size Me documentary, McAfee gathered volunteers from around the world who would, for one hour a day, surf the Internet, signing up for various newsletters, filling in various forms. As they did so, the participants were asked to blog about their experiences.

On Tuesday, McAfee released the results of the experiment it called S.P.A.M., or Spammed Persistently All Month.

Over the course of the month, McAfee's test subjects accumulated 104,000 spam messages, or roughly 70 per day per recipient. Put another way, 87 percent of all the e-mail captured on the test laptops was considered to be spam. That isn't too surprising.

What is surprising, according to Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications for McAfee Avert Labs, is the amount of foreign language spam, with Germany and France having the highest percentage of local language spam.

Other findings include:

Men received more spam than women (76.6 per day vs. 60.6 per day).

The United States received more total spam, followed by Brazil and Italy.

Nigerian scam e-mails are more popular in the United Kingdom than in the United States.

What's also interesting, at least to me, is that the McAfee results were similar to results released by Symantec. McAfee used about 50 real-world participants while Symantec used its DeepThreat Network of thousands of computers worldwide.

You can hear more of Dave Marcus' observations on the McAfee results in this week's Security Bite's podcast.

[Pete Bardo]

Isn't that nice! In their effort to measure email spam, these guys recruited form-spammers. So that's where all that form spam came from--and now that the project is over the amount of form spam we get has also decreased. Thanks so much, McAfee! BTW, I'd be happy if 70 spam emails a day were all I get. I get between 500 and 1500 of them a day.

[james.sysadmin]

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[c1_ken]

Without going too much into statistics - it doesn't take a huge sample of the group you're interested in to be able to project to the group. Operative phrase is "how you select the sample".

It was only a month study, so undoubtably, the amount of spam these people would receive over time will increase.

What does this study add to the body of knowledge? Up front, I would have gone - (1) "If you don't protect your system, you'll get spam. If you then sign up for spam, you get more spam." Looks like this was validated :-) . (2) Cliche from the 1800's, robbers rob banks because "that's where the money is." Spammers will focus a great deal of their efforts where.........."people have cash"

Men could have received more spam per day because they were more agressive in signing up for things. They could have spent a bit more time each day, etc. The difference between the two if analyzed rigorously, may not be signficant.