Spammers are Winning the Battle

Anyone that opens their inbox in their email program can tell right away that they either have more friends than they ever thought possible, or the spammers are winning the battle against spam. In the past six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse.

All across the world, spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam-filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every 10 e-mails sent over the Internet. Much of this flood of spam is made up of a new type of junk-mail called image spam. This makes the advertising words a part of the picture making it much more difficult to simply filter it out as spam.

{slot15}

The renewed spam plague is happening even though there had been signs that Gates' prediction might come true. More effective anti-spam software for companies and individual users, and the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which required spam senders to clearly label their messages as advertisements and meted out prison terms for violators, gave customers hope. Spam volume actually declined for the first time, for two months in a row, last year. But as many information technology administrators will testify, the respite was short-lived.

With the sudden appearance of new sources of spam makes it more difficult for companies to rely on blacklists of known junk e-mail distributors. Also, by using other people's computers to scatter their e-mail across the Internet, spammers vastly increase the number of messages they can send out, without having to pay for the data traffic they generate.

Patrick Peterson, vice president for technology at Ironport said "As an industry, I think we are losing. The bad guys are simply outrunning most of the technology out there today."

What's new with Tech? Latest News In Technology

You can share this Tech news story with your friends or family from our Technology section. This article can be shared through e-mail or sent to online social Web sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others. You can choose from one of the options below.

Share Article Link:

Send Link via Email: