Spam ain't spam anymore

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 19 December 2007 06:36

Opinion and Analysis

It's also likely that 2008 will see an even greater increase in spam volumes than 2007 because the spammers spent most of 2007 just getting into their stride. "2007 has been a year of trial and refinement for spammers. While the first half of the year did not bring a remarkable increase in the number of spam messages sent, spammers showed incredible persistence in testing and refining their attacks.

"Now that they have found significant weaknesses in the way that many spam engines handle URL-only messages, there will be an explosion on the order of the three-fold image spam increase seen in 2006. In fact, the past few months have already seen considerable uptick in worldwide spam volume. This trend is expected to continue through the holiday season, making the total amount of spam sent in 2007 larger than possibly all email sent in total since the medium was invented."

IronPort's recommendations as to how to combat this are entirely defensive. This is perhaps not surprising their focus is on providing network security technologies and services to enterprise and government end users. But for how long can this continue? IronPort notes that "The escalating investment required to [provide protection against spam] will drive consolidation of the anti-spam industry, as only a small number of vendors will have the resources to stay ahead of spam."

But what about the users? Protecting against spam is not core business. The expense provides no direct return on investment and is something the poor old IT manager has to justify largely by invoking the fear factor. "If we don't spend this money the whole IT infrastructure could collapse."

Added to that is the traffic load that spam puts on the Internet. Web monitoring company Pingdom measured the sizes of spam messages hitting its own server to calculate that the daily load of 120 billion spam messages quoted by IronPort represents traffic t of 512 terabytes a day.

The time is clearly long overdue for some concerted action by th world's governments to kill spam at source. The OECD thinks so too. Back in April 2006 I reported on iTWire that: "the OECD has urged governments and industry to adopt a more co-ordinated approach to battling spam, saying it has become damaging and costly for business and a regular weapon in the arsenal of cyber criminals."