Yahoo!News: Season's greetings: it's spam for the holidays

[turetzsr]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061220/tc_nm/work_spam_dc_5

Excerpts:

<snip>Unsolicited messages, or spam, which account for nine out of 10 e-mails, fill up the inboxes of computer users more than ever at this time of year, experts say.

<snip>

The unscrupulous commit identity theft by luring unsuspecting recipients into disclosing personal information, while others commit fraud with the lure of phony offers.

The glut of spam can clog business communications systems to the extent that e-mails at the workplace can be held up for hours, if not days, experts say.

"The threat of this is that e-mail becomes no longer productive as a tool, and that is scary because e-mail is ubiquitous. Most businesses could no longer run without it," Druker said.

spam cost an estimated $17 billion in the United States last year in lost productivity and the expense of measures to fight it, according to San Francisco-based Ferris Research.

Worldwide, the cost was estimated at $50 billion.

<snip>

NEW TRICKS

The amount of spam has exploded in recent months, experts say, as spammers have adopted new tricks. Research by Postini found a record 93 percent of e-mail was spam from September through November.

"The spammers are definitely winning at this point. It's gotten much worse," said Gerald Thain, a professor of consumer law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in e-mail issues.

One of the newest dodges is sending spam in the form of an image rather than text, allowing it to get past filters that trap spam by hunting down specific words.

So-called image e-mails account for some 30 percent of junk e-mails, compared with just 2 percent in 2005, Postini said.

Another ploy is called phishing, in which an official-looking e-mail asks recipients for passwords or personal information.

"Pump and dump" e-mails urge recipients to buy certain stocks, driving up the price, while in other schemes spammers hijack other computers -- turning them into what pros call zombies -- to deliver their messages.

"We recently saw 400,000 new zombies coming online every day," said Atri Chatterjee, senior vice president of marketing at Secure Computing Corp. in Alpharetta, Georgia.

"What you have is a very aggressive use of innocent computers," he said.

<snip>

Not only has the amount of spam ballooned, but its nature has changed, said Druker.

"First it was hackers trying to show off how smart they were. Then it shifted to annoying marketers," he said. "Now a large percentage of this stuff is coming from criminal networks who are out to steal your money."

[SargeAnt]

Fair enough.

The bad thing is that Yahoo themselves are among top ten at the SenderBase for years.

The pyramid builders in Russia would ALWAYS use a yahoo mail account as their contact. And many spammers do so too.

the Yahoo need a ten times larger abuse department as they have now.

[turetzsr]

<snip>

The bad thing is that Yahoo themselves are among top ten at the SenderBase for years.

<snip>

...Perhaps I should have clarified: this is news that appeared on My!Yahoo from one of the news services to which Yahoo's subscribes, not something published by Yahoo.