Don't get enough spam already and think you should get more? Then you will probably feel jealous of the 50 participants of McAfee's global Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) of April. These 50 regular Joe's ranging from 17 year old high school students (Hello Zach) to a mother of three (Zach's Mom Tracy) and a university student (Katya) among others in all areas of the globe are the guinea pigs in this experiment to run throughout April 2008.

Basically these participants have been given a dedicated laptop, a pre-paid credit card and a mission. Their mission is to do everything wrong and see what the results are. They are going to respond to Spam messages - buy the 'Genuine Replica Watches' on-line and sign up for everything they can and see what happens. William reported on Day 2 that without any protective software running he received 160 Spam messages and is getting pop-ups and browser hijacks 'on a regular basis'. The Blogs are a very interesting read.

Here Are My Predictions:

1. The laptops that these people are using will become a "willing soldier" in one of the Spam Bot armies lurking out there and may end up sending themselves (and us) more Spam. How is that for irony?

- Collectively the top botnets are capable of sending over 100 billion Spam messages per day*

2. Malware - The laptops will have to be wiped and re-installed for everyone at least once during the month. They are going to do this anyway for the participants at the end of the experiment before they get to keep them so this will be good practice. I'm not sure I would trust these laptops even after they are wiped though with the rootkits that are now being incorporated into the Bot software. Reports are coming in already that the laptops are slowing down and becoming unresponsive.

3. Massive consuption of time - the management of this Spam will take more and more time until these participants will not be able to do anything but read and reply to e-mail all day long.

4. Cyber Crime - all the participants have been given 'new identities' just like someone in the witness protection program to use online. I predict that some of these identities will be sold on the black market and thus stolen.

McAfee is of course going to use this experiment to advertise that there is a lot of Spam out there and that you need protection but I could have told you that - just look at the CudaMail statistics page. ;)

- Shaun

* Source: www.secureworks.com/research/threats/topbotnets/?threat=topbotnets

For More Information:

www.mcafeespamexperiment.com
www.echannelline.com/canada/printer.cfm?item=DLY040708-2

Notorious 'spam king' Robert Soloway has pleaded guilty to additional charges (fraud and tax evasion) related to his previous conviction for sending out huge volumes of Spam.
 
US Department of Justice indictment against Soloway:

> www.usdoj.gov/usao/waw/press/2007/may/soloway.html

Seattle times article on Soloway's guilty plea on the new charges:

> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004283998_spamking15m.html 

The question to the reader therefore is 'Do you think that this sentence will result in less spam to your inbox?'
 
Sadly the answer is probably 'no' as the trend in Spam is still increasing and human nature, on both sides of the equation, being what it is won't change.
 
There are a number of sites you can go to if you want to look at Spam trends and one such site is Barracuda Central:

www.barracudacentral.com/index.cgi?p=spam
 
You can go there if you want to look at the pretty graphs but the number that jumps out at me is that worldwide the number of messages processed by all Barracuda Anti-Spam Firewalls yesterday was over 2 Billion. 2,277,470,908 to be exact and of that number the vast majority or 2,170,841,992 (95.32%) were blocked as Spam. This is in contrast to the same statistics a year ago where the number of messages processed per day was around 1 Billion per day and the Spam percentage was around 92%.
 
Sadly, the Spam mix is still about 50% off-brand pharmaceuticals and about 25% knockoff products which tells you what is profitable to the Spammers. If people stopped responding to these advertisements and voted with their cash then the Spammers would not be profitable and would have to look elsewhere for their next easy meal.

Will human nature change overnight?
 
Probably not. Consumers want a good deal and are not likely to change and the Spammers have found a financial niche that they fit into so expect the volume of Spam to continue and even increase as the effectiveness of anti-spam solutions like the Barracuda appliances, which CudaMail is powered by, makes the Spammers job that much harder. They will ramp up their efforts to sneak Spam past such solutions rather than change their nature.
 
- Shaun

AVG Research has released an interesting report on the changing malware landscape.  According to AVG, viruses now account for less than 15% of total threats, with phishing scams, backdoor worms, Trojans, keyloggers, spyware, adware and web-based exploits making up the rest.

For 2008 AVG predicts an increase in the number of web attacks on legitimate web sites, particularly social network sites, in order to use these sites for the illegal capture of user data and for the propagation of malware. Folks, over the last year I have been advising you to run your browser in a sandbox or with reduced rights. This is one of the reasons why. In the future you may not be able to assume that those "trusted" websites you visit have not been temporarily compromised.

http://www.avg.com.au/index.cfm?section=news&feature=83

- Shaun Sturby
Technical Services Manager
CudaMail

There are 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 ways to spell Viagra!

Rob did the math on how many variations you could easily come up with and the above number is what he came up with.

http://cockeyed.com/lessons/viagra/viagra.html

Going after the word is not the way to target the spam.

This came off the Declude forums where someone is trying to come up with all the possible combinations of Viagra.

You can see why the anti-spam people went looking for a better solution.

- Shaun