On line theft cost $1 trillion per year. And too many people still don’t know how to protect themselves.  Experts pointed that as part of society’s central nervous system, attacks on the Internet could threaten whole economies. According to them, 2008 saw more cybercrime than ever, malicious software and more vulnerability than never before! More than what have been seen in the past 5 years combined!

The meeting brought to light 3 major concerns on the virtual space:

• Threat 1 – crime
• Threat 2 – system
• Threat 3 – cyberwarfare

War

New concepts like cyberwarfare emerged in Davos just few days ago. For the experts present, 2008 is the year when cyberwarfare began, with examples of nations making use of web-enabled-devices to bring down important services during diplomatic conflicts. “Which methods could terrorists use to attack or undermine the whole Internet?” The question came up during the discussions. Read more here.

Some participants proposed the creation of a World Heath Organisation for the Internet, considering that virtual viruses can harm systems and economies the same way a real viruses cause diseases to people. But the Internet strength’s was its open nature. Would a centralization lead one of the most democratic creation of the humankind to limit its innovation, evolution and growth? It is up to us, the users to address and discuss the topic.

Ideas to consider about spam and cybercrime threatening the Internet:

“This is not vandalism anymore, but organised criminality.”

“It’s not about technology, but economy.”

References: BBCWorld
World Economic Forum

Which websites, blogs or Email chains have you seen or received that you think deserve to go direct to the Worldwide Internet Recycle Bin forever? Let’s imagine there is a giant recyble bin to where you could send all useless and harmful web or email content. What would you send? A celebrity website? An useless email chain? A phishing link…? Rendez-vous in our session Recycle Bin!

You just have to fill in the calculator with the following information:

• Number of employees with email
• Number of workdays per year per employee
• Average hourly salary per employee
• Average number of spam messages per day per employee
• Number of seconds wasted with each spam message

It gives you the lost salary and lost productivity yearly in a whole, as well as the total cost of spam per employee. It’s, of course, a very simple tool and doesn’t take into consideration the carachteristics of any business. For example, it’s difficult to precise how much time each employee spends dealing with spam. I’ve just found on Geek.com the following statement, written by Mathew Hamphries:

“Google’s solution to spam keeps costs down by keeping your e-mail in the cloud, meaning no hardware for a company to buy, no updates to keep applying, and no cost hikes if spam levels spike. But as Richard Cox, chief information officer at Spamhaus has pointed out, Google could do a lot to cut spam by blocking spammers on the Gmail service”. He said:

If you could see how many anonymous Gmail drop boxes are being used as the registration addresses for domains that are being used in spam, you’d understand just how much this is costing the community.

I can imagine how many boxes are being used by spammers. Have a look at our session Spam of the day to see how much spam this blogger receives through Gmail provider.

The numbers speak for themselves: 1,200 minutes per year is the amount of time an employee spends dealing with spam, which makes two whole working days! “ The Cost Impact of Spam Filters: Measuring the Effect of Information System Technologies in Organizations” is a study headed by the Ideas, a department of the University of Connecticut. Ideas – one of the largest bibliographie database freely available on the Internet – uses Repec (Research Papers in Economics) datas to produces its work.

You can download the research project.

According to the InformationWeek website, the anti-spam organization says that while all networks claim to be against spam, some look the other way to sell services to spammers and others choose not to close holes in their systems because doing so would be expensive.

The Spamhaus report states that  the majority of the world’s service providers succeed in keeping spammers off their networks and work to maintain a positive anti-spam reputation, but their work is undermined daily by the few networks [that], out of corporate greed or mismanagement, choose to be part of the problem,” Spamhaus explains on its Web site. Read more.

Hard to believe companies like Google really fight spam, when the ones who have an account on Gmail know how much spam we can get in a single day! I get between 15 and 25 spam messages per day. And strangely, some spam are about topics I researched on the web. Today for example, I got a spam about iTunes,  which is curious if we consider I have just downloaded iTunes a day ago. Sometimes Google scares me!

Elected US president

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Barack Obama refuses to become the next US president. Wait, wait. This is not some sort of joke or tragedy, it’s a new type of Spam, surfing on the Obamania wave. Check it out on our Spam of the Day.

Check this video explaining what spam is. Simple and clear language.

1.        Best Sales 2008!
2.        Spend less this Christmas
3.        A Really Good Gift
4.        Christmas Specials
5.        Christmas promo few days left
6.        Gifts for Christmas
7.        Holiday Luxury Gifts
8.        Hot Christmas Specials
9.        Most Affordable Gifts
10.      Low Christmas Pricing

Not only Christmas made the happiness of spammers. Major events such as the Mumbai terrorist attack and the U.S. presidential election made them work hard. They obstructed our in-boxes with medication offerings and messages like “Obama Wouldn’t Be First Black President.”

Read more

But what are spam about?

According to the same report, the most sent spam are about Internet and money, as bellow:

22% Internet and computer-related services

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18% Product offering, marketing general goods and services, financial spam related to money, the stock market or other monetary ‘opportunities’

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The rest is a mix of other offerings and services, from real estate offers to travel and tourism, pornography and so son. Have you ever paid attention to what are the most received spam in your Email box?

Font: www.itp.net

Is spam taking over the web?

This blog has the purpose to promote the discussion about the virtual trash lying out there on the web. The amount of spam and virtual trash is threatening the future of the web and making companies waste money and time on a daily basis. According to Phillip Hallam-Baker, a scientist who created the security protocols of the web, spam can  paralyse and even “kill” the web any time soon, by the huge amount of traffic they generate.

Spam’s effects include the consumption of human time and attention, computer and networks resources. Spam has direct and indirect costs. According to specialists, the cost to providers of search engines is considerable. They are inundated with useless pages, increasing the cost of each processed query.

Spam can be used to spread virus, Trojan horses, malicious software, pornography, and for the practice of cyber crimes, financial theft and many others illicit purposes.

We can’t forget the scams – software which in general involves a blond girl promising a hot striptease if you enter a given code, however the sexy show never happens.

But not only spam are considered a major problem for the Internet.

Millions of useless and abandoned websites are slowing down the web and occupying space. In 2006, according to Jakob Nielsen, the latest web survey found 101,435,253 websites. A significant number of them are useless pages, such as abandoned weblogs and “parked domains.

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Specialists:

What are the possibilities to fight spam? What’s the real cost for companies and users? How can spam stop the web? And the Internet trash, what to do with it? Is anyone taking care of it?

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Users:

What can users do to make the web better? How do we contribute to slow down and threat the future of the web?

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What have you been doing to help to clean and make the Internet safer?