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

The credit crunch is also probably reflected in the fact that adverts for watches, usually luxury brands and often fakes, were at the bottom of the list.

The top 10 most popular spam categories were:

1. Advertisements
2. Financial
3. Health and Medicine
4. Adult Services
5. Free Stuff
6. Education
7. IT Related
8. Money Making
9. Credit Cards
10. Watch Adverts

Dave De Walt, CEO of McAfee, concludes that the S.P.A.M. experiment proves that even though people think they know the dangers of spam, they don’t understand the true extent. "Our participants came from all walks of life, from all over the world and, given their interest to take part in the experiment, they were well aware of the problem" he says, adding "Despite this, they were all shocked by the sheer amount of spam they attracted in such a short timeframe and the lengths the spammers would go to in order to achieve success. I think we can see from the experiment that spam is undeniably linked to cybercrime, however it is such an immense problem and it’s never going to go away."

Hey, thanks for the upbeat and optimistic conclusion Dave...