Spam's demise proves unfounded

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 24 Jan 2006 at 15:39

Bill Gates' prediction, two years ago, that spam would be obsolete by today has proved untrue.

In an incredible act of defiance, spam appears to have ignored The Chief Software Architect.

According to UK security company Sophos, spam continues to hamper inboxes at levels of around 70 per cent for received email. 'No, there's been no decrease in the amount of spam,' Sophos' Senior Technology Consultant Graham Cluley said.

Gates made his comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2004, predicting that spam would be a 'thing of the past' within two years.

At the time, Gates had placed a certain amount of faith in proposals he expected to successfully wipe out the problem, which Microsoft was under a lot of pressure to do, not least because of the impact spam has on its Hotmail and MSN services.

Proposal such as Sender ID aimed to tackle spoofed spam and phishing by authentication techniques. Yet the initiative foundered after licensing and patent disputes and rival systems dragged it into a quagmire of bickering and belligerence.

It quickly became apparent that Gates would be eating his words.

Dead, it may not be, but the spam landscape is changing dramatically, with the US now accounting for less than a quarter of spam received.

The US still heads the charts with 24.5 per cent, but the effect of legislation and high profile arrests have had an impact. Although the CAN-SPAM Act hasn't itself resulted in many convictions, US State law has been successful in prosecuting the likes of Jeremy Jaynes, who was sentenced to nine years in 2005.

Cluley said that legal activities in the US have been useful 'for sending out a background radiation message', that makes spamming that much riskier.

Last year, South Korea was the second most prolific spamming nation, put largely down its exemplary Net infrastructure, offering bucket loads of bandwidth, and likewise plenty of spamming opportunities.

One way or another, the spammers now see the land of opportunity over the border in China. South Korea now accounts for 9.7 per cent, while 22.3 per cent of spam is from the People's Republic.

The remainder of the chart make up low single-digit percentages and number mainly European and Asian countries.

Brazil is the only South American nation to chart, at number six. This is surprisingly low given the sinister online reputation Brazil is garnering with numerous phishing and Trojan campaigns originating there. It's clearly a country with a well developed underground of Net criminality.

Likewise, Poland is the only East European country to chart, despite criminal gangs known for extortion and phishing attacks operating the region.

Russia also doesn't chart - another anomaly in that Cluley noted a rise in non-english language spam, particularly Russian and Asian.

The UK slips out of Sophos' 'dirty dozen' for the first time, largely down to better desktop protection, according to Cluley.

The top twelve spam relaying countries are as follows:

October to December 2005

1. United States 24.5 %
2. China (inc Hong Kong) 22.3 %
3. South Korea 9.7 %
4. France 5.0 %
5. Canada 3.0 %
6. Brazil 2.6 %
7. Spain 2.5 %
8. Austria 2.4 %
9. Taiwan 2.1 %
10. Poland 2.0 %