Just stop it, you spam-loving moron!
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in phishing, Blog, Spam, Security, email on
No, seriously, please stop. Yes, you. New research suggests that one in every six people click on spam. I don’t, and I’ve asked the four other people in the office if they do and they say no as well. So it must be you.
According to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) the people who do click are doing so because they are “curious” although I prefer to think of them as just being morons. It does not take a genius to work out that the more spam gets those click-throughs then the more spam will be churned out, often directly to the link-clicking morons in question. It only requires a small spark of common sense to realise that the same spam links can often lead to more than just an offer of some fake Viagra, and the curious clicker gets added to a botnet for good measure.
Yet the MAAWG survey results suggest that 80 percent of users doubt their computers were at risk of bot infection. Morons. Especially when the security industry is, with alarming regularity, revealing exactly how much of the spam that we get is actually being distributed by spambots. MessageLabs Intelligence, for example, recently stated that the Donbot, Cutwail and Mega-D botnets were sending up to 21 billion spam messages each day.
Disturbingly, two-thirds of the consumers surveyed considered themselves “very” or “somewhat” knowledgeable in Internet security.
“Spamming has morphed from an isolated hacker playing with some code into a well-developed underground economy that feeds off reputable users’ machines to avoid detection. Consumers shouldn’t be afraid to use email, but they need to be computer smart and learn how to avoid these problems” said MAAWG Chair Michael O’Reirdan.
The complete 60-page survey report, “A Look at Consumers’ Awareness of Email Security and Practices or ‘Of Course I Never Reply to Spam, Except Sometimes’” includes graphs, detailed findings and analysis, and it’s downloadable from MAAWG free of charge.
Rated: 46.67% (3 votes)
Loading ...Pingback by - September 14, 2009 on 1:00 pm
[…] I know I have upset readers in the past by calling them morons for clicking on spam links in email, but this time I will let you off as it’s a rather […]
Comment by - October 9, 2009 on 8:00 am
i like
Pingback by - October 21, 2009 on 9:34 am
[…] comes to phishing sites there are two universal truths: people click on the links because they are lacking in ITSec smarts, and the fake sites themselves get decommissioned very quickly indeed. So why not exploit the […]
Comment by - November 4, 2009 on 10:24 am
Hello, I want to thank you for this nice blog.
Make a comment
Tag cloud
Archives
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
Most commented posts
- 80 percent of viruses love Windows 7
147 comments
- Has Microsoft gone mental?
- Has the US Army declared war on Windows 7?
- Cuil frozen out: market share drops to next to nothing
- Xbox 360 FAIL
- The 24GB RAM Desktop is born
- Use old version of Windows instead of Linux, says teacher
- Microsoft reveals time-based licensing model
- Nexus Two - The Next Generation
- Windows XP: the invincible OS
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Why ecommerce fails (100%)
- Google Chrome stands alone at PWN2OWN (100%)
- Betting on Hubdub technology (100%)
- Has Google gone insane as GMail goes back to beta? (100%)
- Chinese whispers as government implicated in UK hack attacks (100%)
- Crimeware toolkit targets 10,000 trusted sites (100%)
- Black Hat risk to migrating VMs (100%)
- Tough on cyber crime, tough on the causes of cyber crime (100%)
- Firefox 3, Beta 4, Enhancements 900, Tested 5 (100%)
- Has the US Army declared war on Windows 7? (100%)
