The Great S.P.A.M. Experiment

Malware is known to piggyback on spam, finding entry to millions of computers at home and in the workplace. Spam is not just a nuisance, it can be dangerous without the proper software protection.

A few months ago, McAfee (News - Alert), Inc., the anti-virus and anti-malware folks, launched its global S.P.A.M. (Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment. For 30 days a cross section of the world’s population (a group of 50 consisting of housewives, students, retirees, government officials, etc.) were given spanking clean laptops, an email address absolutely no anti-spam software, and then asked to surf the web unprotected, buy things online and register for promotional items. Then McAfee set up blogs for the participants at www.mcafeespamexperiment.com so they could describe their experiences, as McAfee tallied how much spam was arriving in each respective email mailbox.

McAfee discovered that the average web user will collect 70 spam messages each day.

The U.S. participants topped the list, with 23,233 spam emails received. In second place was Brazil with 15,856. Italy was next with 15,610, then Mexico with 12,229. The U.K. came in fifth with 11,965. Australia had 9,214, The Netherlands 6,378, Spain 5,419, France 2,597, and Germany 2,331.

Many of the bloggers noted how their systems were slowing down over time, which suggests that malware arriving in spam or websites they visited was installing itself and usingCPU power to conduct some nefarious activities – such as use the host PC to send out more spam. About 8 percent of the spam consisted of so-called ‘phishing’ emails that attempt to blatantly trick or otherwise cajole users into divulging their various usernames, passwords and account numbers.

Spam recently celebrated its 30th “anniversary”, so to speak. 30 years ago (May 3rd, 1978) to be exact, there was a great minicomputer company, now part of Hewlett Packard, called DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). Gary Thuerk, a marketer at DEC, decided to send an email to 393 users of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. That fateful email — now considered to be the first example of spam, started off as follows: “DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T.”

Thuerk apparently wasn’t familiar with the ‘Sndmsg’ email program. The email addresses inadvertently overflowed into the body of the text, resulting in not all the intended 393 recipients receiving the spammed message. That didn’t stop the one who did receive it from being incredibly angry. They claimed it was an illegal use of the ARPANET.

Recently, Adaptive Mobile (www.adaptivemobile.com), a mobile security company, marked the 30th anniversary of spam by pointing out how spammers are moving their efforts to mobile phones. A YouGov report estimates that two thirds of mobile users in the U.K. have received mobile spam or phishing attacks. In China, mobile users receive six to ten spam message a day.

It appears that spam evolves along with the technology it leverages.