Spammers Defy Bill Gates’ Death-of-Spam Prophecy And Get Creative With Social Networking
IT security and control firm Sophos has published its report on the latest trends in spam, and revealed the top twelve spam-relaying countries for the final quarter of 2008. The investigation reveals that, five years after Bill Gates predicted spam would be eradicated, it remains a major problem for computer users as spammers veer away from traditional techniques and get creative – with no end in sight.
On January 24, 2004 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates declared that spam would be ‘a thing of the past’ within two years. However, with the prophecy’s five-year anniversary approaching, experts at SophosLabs have revealed that the latest figures for Q4 2008 indicate that spam is still causing problems for computer users and assuming more guises than ever before. Furthermore, more spam is malicious and often designed to infect users’ computers via sophisticated malware attachments or a link to malicious or infected websites, in order to steal sensitive information.