McAfee released on Tuesday the results of a monthlong spam experiment. The security company provided 50 people worldwide with a clean laptop armed only with antivirus protection (no anti-spam protection) and a brand new domain for e-mail. McAfee then asked them to surf the Net and blog about their experiences.
Within the first 24 hours, the individuals received their first spam e-mail in the S.P.A.M. (Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment.
Over the course of 30 days, McAfee's test subjects accumulated 104,000 spam e-mails, or roughly 70 spam messages per day per recipient. Put another way, 87 percent of all the e-mail captured on the test laptops was considered to be spam.
I spoke with Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications for McAfee Avert Labs, about the experiment and the results.
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This week, CNET's Robert Vamosi talks about spam with Matt Sergeant, senior antispam technologist for MessageLabs.
About two weeks ago, MessageLabs discovered that spammers were publishing to Google Docs. What this does, says Sergeant, is allow spammers to use Google's incredible bandwidth and also have a Web site that is never going to get blacklisted.
Also, MessageLabs this week reported an uptick in the number of spam e-mails related to the Storm worm and botnet. A few weeks ago, MessageLabs said that Storm was going away, its numbers decreasing. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. The new burst of infections, according to Sergeant, number around 80,000.
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Robert Vamosi has appeared on CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, and various other media outlets as an expert on computer viruses, spyware, identity theft, phishing, and other criminal activities on the Internet.
