This Just In: Spam Actually Works
by Blight Crusader
A shocking — shocking! — story is making the rounds of the media currently, to the tune of: “spam actually works.” What a surprise! The notion that email scammers are actually making money at what they do, instead of clogging the pipeline of the world’s email just for fun (or for nefarious purposes, in the same way James Bond villains will occasionally hold the world hostage), is an absolute revelation in some circles, it appears.
For anyone who has been living under a rock for the past… oh, two or three decades… here’s a newsflash: the spam fight never ends. Fighting spam requires installing bot detection software, fraud detection services, bot prevention, click fraud tracking, click fraud auditing, click fraud monitoring, bot removal, login protection, and web fraud prevention, which can all be conveniently integrated by one single company.
But for those who have indeed been asleep for ten years or more, here is the full UPI report on the spam situation, apparently triggered off by a shocking — shocking! — press release from Lashback:
Digital bulk mail, known as spam, has a tendency to show up on U.S. computers because it is often a moneymaker, an e-mail watchdog firm said.
“The things that wind up in your in-box … are there because people buy them,” said Brandon Phillips, chief executive officer of Lashback, a firm that tracks e-mails to see if they meet federal laws, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Monday.
Estimates on how much spam is flying around cyberspace run as high as 97 percent of all e-mails, an estimate made by Microsoft Corp., although others put the figure at around 85 percent.
The aggregate amount of aggravating solicitations is growing. Project Honey Pot, which monitors spam, said the number of active bots — systems that use hijacked computers to send e-mails — has quadrupled in each of the past five years and now number about 400,000 a day.
When tracking spam, Lashback found 6 percent of Internet users in surveys indicate they knowingly open spam because of an interest in the product, the newspaper said.
“People are sort of resigned to the fact they’re going to get spam. It’s just a question of how much,” said Lorrie Cranor, an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
