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
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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
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