The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has released new figures that put the average volume of email spam on the internet at 90%, peaking as high as 94.2% in recent years.
Jerry Upton, MAAWG Executive Director said “We’ve been sitting at a stalemate for probably two to three years. Taking out the highs and lows, we’re sitting at about 90%”.
Figures that regularly appear from various security vendors have been telling the same story for several years now. With latest figures confirming the continuing trend one might be forgiven for wondering who is really winning the war against spam.
Spam fighting is a multi-billion dollar industry and businesses are spending thousands or even millions of dollars each year to try and protect their networks from spam threats.
Network providers have had some successes by disconnecting major spam networks from the internet but in most cases the spammers have resurfaced or simply distributed their infrastructure across international jurisdictions.
Consumer ISPs are generally against implementing measures to prevent their customers from adding to the problem. This despite MAAWG’s findings that “tens of millions of Web users in North America and Western Europe have clicked on spam at least once – and many of them did it on purpose”. Continue reading The Spam Statemate



A zero-day bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer was a key element in an attack on Google and other companies last week. The attack, designed to ransack the Gmail of some Chinese human-rights activists managed to clip some of the Search King’s intellectual property in the process.
The last few years have seen a sharp rise in the power and features of smart phones such as the Blackberry, Apple iPhone, and most recently Google Android-based phones.
Despite denials from Google, a security researcher
A new report by security researchers claims that Google’s reCAPTCHA system is flawed – so flawed that it would allow a botnet with just 10,000 zombies to manage 10 recognition successes an hour resulting in over 850,000 fake accounts being registered each day. The researchers say the flaw is the same one that has plagued all CAPTCHA services -the human factor- but with a twist.
