Spam sticks around because it works: Report
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Although anti-spam utilities have grown more sophisticated and email users have grown more savvy, email spam shows no signs of slowing down, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Brandon Phillips, CEO of email security firm Lashback, told the Post-Dispatch that "the things that wind up in your in-box: They are there because people buy them." The report says that spammers require only a few responses to their campaigns to turn a profit, because the cost of sending a huge raft of unwanted emails is so low.
The Post-Dispatch also cites a report issued by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, showing that fully half of email users have voluntarily opened what they believed to be spam, and over 10 percent of those users said that they did so because they were interested in the product the spammer was selling.
The spam industry has taken significant hits in 2009, however, suffering legal setbacks as courts slapped Sanford Wallace with a $711 million fine as well as operational ones, as security professionals took down a botnet thought to be responsible for roughly 10 percent of all spam.
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