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Information Technology News McAfee global S.P.A.M. experiment concludes that spam will never go away
Information Technology News McAfee global S.P.A.M. experiment concludes that spam will never go away | McAfee global S.P.A.M. experiment concludes that spam will never go away |
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| by Davey Winder | |
| Tuesday, 01 July 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 4 While the UK participants, there were 5 of them in all,
attracted a total of 11,965 spams this only represented enough to put
them fifth in terms of total spam by country. No surprises at all to
discover that the US topped the volume chart with twice as much
(23,233) although Brazil in second place (15,856) was unexpected.
Where the UK did score highly was when it came to being targeted by Nigerian spam scams. The infamous 419 advance fee fraud where the spammer come scammer promises a huge amount of money, often as a result of some dodgy business deal or phony bequeathment, and all you have to do to release it is pay a modest fee to oil the wheels as it were. 419 frauds get their name from the article of Nigerian Criminal Code that deals with obtaining money under false pretenses, aptly enough. Participants in the UK were found to attract some 23 percent of all such spam during the experiment. They also attracted a lot of sexual spam, coming second only to the US with some 18 percent of all adult spam received. McAfee has been able to prove that spam is more than just a nuisance, with many emails being of the phishing variety while others carried virus and malware payloads. As far as the UK participants were concerned, none had any virus infected emails although 8 percent were classified as phishing messages. What many did notice, however, was a gradual slowing down in the overall performance of the PC as they got further into the experiment and received ever more spam. Want to know why PC performance was degraded by spam? Read on for the answer... CONTINUED |
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