11/30/2005
Spam e−mail filters getting better?? Says who
November 28, Reuters — Federal Trade Commission: Spam e−mail filters getting better. E−mail spammers are aggressive as ever but Internet providers are getting better at blocking junk messages before they reach users’ inboxes, according to a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) study released on Monday, November 28. The FTC found that spammers continue to “scrape” e−mail addresses from the Web using automated programs that look for the telltale “@” sign. But up to 96 percent of those messages were blocked by the two Web−based e−mail providers used by the FTC in its test. The FTC did not say which providers it used in its study. “This encouraging result suggests that anti−spam technologies may be dramatically reducing the burden of spam on consumers,” the report said. The FTC noted that Internet providers still must bear the burden of filtering out those messages.
FTC Press Release: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/11/spam3.htm
FTC Spam study: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/11/spamharvest.pdf
Source
I found this particularly interesting coming on the heels of Sophos revelation that the recent Sober variant impact has been estimated at 14% of the email on the net being infected and tied to Sober. There’s certainly been a goodly amount of that stuff getting through in the past week, and it looks like spam to my filters.
Filed by Ken at 5:53 pm under InfoSec, Technology
