[LINK] Cisco says 90 per cent of email is spam

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

<brd>
Here's a couple of news reports that, taken together, say something 
about the predictive abilities of Bill Gates:
</brd>

Gates Believes Spam Will Be Eliminated Within Two Years
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2004-11-22
http://www.securitypronews.com/news/securitynews/spn-45-20041122GatesBelievesSpamWillBeEliminatedWithinTwoYears.html

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes spam will be a thing of the 
past within two years. He did not elaborate on his definition of spam.

"Spam is a major security problem," Mr Gates told a group in Madrid. "We 
hope this problem will be under control within two years,"

Gates comments come on the heels of Microsoft chief executive Steve 
Ballmer's remark that he and Bill Gates are the most spammed individuals 
in the world.

The level of spam has gone down as "new technologies are bringing it 
under control", Mr Gates said. "Governments are also increasingly 
handing out tough sentences to spammers they catch."



Cisco says 90 per cent of email is spam
Correspondents in San Francisco
December 17, 2008
The Australian IT
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24813272-15306,00.html

Armies of hijacked computers are flooding the world with spam as hackers 
devise slicker ways to take over unwitting people's machines, according 
to a Cisco report.

Virus-infected computers are woven into "botnets" used to attack more 
machines and to send specious sales pitches to email addresses in 
low-cost quests to bilk readers out of cash.

"Every year we see threats evolve as criminals discover new ways to 
exploit people, networks and the Internet," said Cisco chief security 
researcher Patrick Peterson.

Junk email referred to as spam accounts for nearly 200 billion messages 
daily, approximately 90 per cent of email worldwide, according to a 
Cisco Annual Security Report.

The United States is the biggest source of spam, accounting for 17.2 per 
cent of the messages. Turkey and Russia ranked second and third, 
accounting for 9.2 per cent and 8 percent of spam respectively, 
according to Cisco.

This year, botnets were used to inject an array of legitimate websites 
with an IFrames malicious code that reroutes visitors to websites that 
download computer viruses into their machines, according to Cisco.

"The botnet is, in many cases, ground-zero for online criminal threats," 
Mr Peterson said.

"Using malware to infect someone's computers is an incredibly common 
mechanism and harnessing them all together is a way they do their click 
fraud, spam emails, and data stealing."

As computer security vendors such as Cisco get better at protecting 
machines from hackers and users grow wary of clicking on unsolicited web 
links or email attachments, online criminals are turning botnets on 
Web-based email accounts.

Hackers are "reputation hijacking" by using botnets to figure out weak 
passwords protecting Web-based email accounts, according to Mr Peterson.

Weak passwords consist of family names, birthdays, home addresses, or 
other terms considered relatively easy to deduce.

Once access is gained to legitimate email accounts, a plethora of spam 
messages sent are sent in the owners' names.

AFP

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Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au