McAfee releases results of its Global S.P.A.M. experiment 13 May, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> Factory Direct Should Not be Cheaper William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Cloud Ecosystem II: A Candid Conversation with Oracle Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Cloud Ecosystem: A Candid Conversation with Rackspace Hosting Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Channel Manager Compensation William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Financial Expertise William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels

"Most interesting aspect of the 30th anniversary of spam is the initial response to spam is exactly the same response to spam now: overwhelmingly negative but it works," said Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager with McAfee's Avert Labs.

30 years ago, Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corp. sent out the first spam message to over 600 recipients advertising the latest DEC product. While the reaction was negative, it reached his intended goal of selling product.

"The goal has stayed the same but where [spam] has evolved is how it goes about," noted Marcus. "It has evolved into event-based spam and they've gotten clever in their techniques but the goal has remained the same: to get a response from somebody and make the spammer money."

That's why in the month of April, McAfee conducted its first Global S.P.A.M. (Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment where participants intentionally clicked on spam messages to surf sites that they were directed to in order to make purchases and to register for promotions in order to see what the consequence of their actions will lead to.

The Global S.P.A.M. Experiment had 50 participants around 10 geographical locations with five in each global region in countries like Germany, Australia, Brazil, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Marcus said the experiment was more successful than anticipated. During the experiment's first week, it received 8000 spam messages and by the end, a total of 120,000 spam messages were received from all participants. In fact, Marcus said that one participant received 11,000 spam messages.

"[Participants] did a great job blogging on their experience and now the interesting analysis starts as we breakdown the spam into country of origin, language, destination and event."

One of the initial findings was that three per cent of all spam collected in the first 24 hours of the experiment were French language-based spam.

Other breakdowns that Marcus expects to see from the experiment's findings include a lot of sports related spam coming from Europe and IRS spam and tax-based spam for U.S. victims.

As well, the experiment saw a lot or Rolex spam, Nigerian spam and pharmacy spam but also new types of spams that were selling mattresses and giving away free dogs.

Marcus hopes to take any future S.P.A.M. experiment into mobile devices and Instant Messaging. One of the results that surprised him was the amount of spams asking people for their mobile number and SMS number to send them information via their mobile phone.

"The whole goal [of the S.P.A.M. experiment] is to expose these guys," said Marcus. "[Spam] is not just a nuisance but it is how people can lose their identity information and their money and by evolving [the experiment] to the same techniques that spammer use, we can create more awareness."