Tech & Biz

97% of All Email is Spam

by Jordan Yerman | April 8, 2009 at 09:20 am

86 views | 16 Recommendations | 4 comments

According to a Microsoft study, 97% of all email sent is spam. Surely Redmond's willingness to sell Hotmail addresses to marketers has nothing to do with that. Anyway, BBC has a great article about the situation (see below), including a malware heatmap. "It's gettin' hot in here- make sure you don't get pwned!" (With apologies to Nelly)

Interestingly, the most malware-free regions are those witheither little-to-no broadband infrastructure or heavily-controlled Internet access (i.e. Burma, Tibet). An exception to this is Japan, which is far "cleaner" than its neighbors.

On April 1st, we carried a story with a list of headlines which may or may not have been true... one of them, Spam Back Up to 94% of all Email, was true, but now seems to be a bit... optimistic.

The report, which looked at online activity during the second half of 2008, also pinpoints the countries that are suffering from the most infections of malicious software, or malware.

Russia and Brazil top the global chart of infections, followed by Turkey and Serbia and Montenegro.

It said that the type of malware varied from country to country.

The study also shows that we, the web-browsing masses, are a bunch of slackers when it comes to security updates:

More than 91% of attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office were using security holes that had been plugged by updates that had been available for more than two years.

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Jordan Yerman

at 09:58 on April 8th, 2009

I feel compelled to add, though, that it depends on one's definition of spam. "Unwanted" email isn't precise enough: for example, what about those e-catalogues you signed up for, forgot about, and then, weeks later, started receiving?

jazzyzazzy

at 16:45 on April 8th, 2009

spam spam spam ,and there was I thinking spam was a slice of meat. It is a case of click no delete. some of the stuff that comes through are not just spam there are also the spam scams.like letters telling you have won a free this or that or rat ta ta tat.

Samsung LN26B360 (not verified)

at 01:29 on April 9th, 2009

Yeah, everyday i received ton of spam mail and i hate it. http://www.mymobilepals.com/samsung-ln26b360-26-inch-720p-lcd-hdtv-reviews

kuuva

at 11:42 on April 9th, 2009

i get about 5-10% spam. i believe google/yahoo have good internal spam filters?

i once heard of a VP at a large semicondutor company comment that while he hated receiving spam, he knew it was good for the company. The more spam there was the more need for more chips and servers. basically, it was good for business.