McAfee global S.P.A.M. experiment concludes that spam will never go away

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 01 July 2008 04:11

Business IT - Security

McAfee has today published the results from its 'Spammed Persistently All Month' experiment, which saw people from 10 countries surf the web unprotected for a whole month. What they encountered is disturbing to say the least...

It was always going to be an ambitious experiment, getting 50 people to browse the web in a reckless fashion without any security protection for a whole month. Now that the 30 days are up, McAfee has released the results of the first study of its kind: the S.P.A.M. experiment.

Each of the participants were encouraged to visit places online that most Internet users avoid for fear of attracting spam attention or machine infection. McAfee then analysed the spam that the guinea pigs received, as well as studied the detailed journals that they kept. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has confirmed that "spammers are as active as ever" and are increasingly "using psychological tricks to lure Internet users to part with their contact details and cash."

As spam continues its way along the evolutionary road, so it utilises more local languages and cultural nuances in an effort to both be positively accepted by the recipient and to avoid detection by spam filtering systems. Adopting a much more highly targeted approach to distribution, rather than rely on the scattergun strategies of old, is also helps keep spam under the radar.

McAfee says that in the first experiment of its kind anywhere in the world, S.P.A.M participants received over 104,000 spam emails across the 30 days. That is just 2096 each on average for a month, or about 70 per day. Now if I were to get only 70 junk mail messages a day my spam filter would not have to work so. My junk folder shows averages 5 times as high, so that was the first surprise of these results out of the way.

Which countries attracted the most spam during the month? Read on to find out...

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