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State of Spam: Episode 5 

Feb 04, 2010 12:48 PM

Deaddin Edris sits down with Eric Park, Abuse Desk Analyst, to discuss the January State of Spam report.  Eric shares some recent metrics and provides some interesting samples of breaking news spam including the recent earthquake in Haiti.

Download the State of Spam Report
 

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Jul 21, 2010 06:21 AM


Where r rest of the Episodes 1 ,2 & 3.


Regards
Saqib Alam

Jun 14, 2010 08:00 PM

Symantec’s data indicates that spam makes up approximately 89% of all messages recently. As you know, spam messages can be just pesky annoying messages you don’t want to receive… all the way to malicious threats that may attack your infrastructure. The main problem with perception of antispam effectiveness is that it is often measured by number of messages the end-users receive, not necessarily the percentage of messages blocked. To an end-user of ISP or enterprise, they could care less about how much spam (in percentage terms) is being blocked… it’s all about “I received 10 spam messages today, and that’s too many”.

Here is an example. In an environment which receives 1 million messages daily… our data (89% spam) would imply 8.9 million spam messages. If antispam product has effectiveness of 98%, 17,800 spam messages would get through. After tuning the product, the effectiveness goes up to 99%. At this point, only 8,900 spam messages would get through.

Unfortunately, all spammers have to do is to simply send more messages. There could potentially be some limits due to bandwith costs and reputation risks, but history indicates that spammers will just make up the higher antispam effectiveness with more volume. In the above example, all spammers have to do is double the volume and 17,800 spam messages will get through… even with 99% antispam effectiveness. To end-users, they see the same amount of spam even after the antispam product got “better”.

I agree that 100% spam blocked is the ultimate deterrent. With today’s standards and technologies however, 100% spam blocked with zero false positives is not possible. Most overlook the false positive factor, but it’s very crucial point for many. After all, what is the point of having a spam folder if you have to comb through it to see if there are any false positives? At that point, spam folder and inbox make no difference.

I also agree that an uniform system would go a great length to control the spam problem. While I do not want to be pessimistic, I am not sure if this is possible due to so many different environments out there with varying platforms, etc.

-Eric

May 03, 2010 05:43 AM


Clearly, with around 72% of e-mail being spam, running spam filters is big and profitable business which is why I don't think there is really serious interest in stopping it.

It's been a decade of more of the same with nothing even remotely likely to reduce the amount of spam e-mail clogging up the the "super highway".

99% of spam blocked is not a deterrent, 100% is.

If the world got together and used a uniform system it could make unsolicited spam non-viable whilst allowing controlled spam to reach it's destination.

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