The McAfee team has just recently finished analyzing all the data from the S.P.A.M. (short for Spammed Persistently All Month) and a report has been made available. Entitled "Global S.P.A.M. Diaries", the report includes a detailed and comprehensive presentation of all the McAfee findings.

Jeff Green, Senior Vice President with McAfee comments: "What have I gained during these last 30 days? Well, at least I got rid of this itch, this
curiosity, clicking on any and everything on the World Wide Web just to see the outcome. Clearly clicking on a flashing window, or signing up for diet advice in the form of a newsletter as anticipated is foolish. I will continue to be more diligent paying much more attention to where I enter my personal email address, as well as my contact information."

People from ten countries took part in the experiment (5 from each), and according to the McAfee report the US came out on top of the rankings. The US participants received a total of 23,233 spam messages which made up for 22% of the total amount of spam received over the entire month. Brazil and Italy came in at number 2 and 3, but the difference between the two was quite small (Italy needed only 246 messages to catch up to Brazil, which had a total of 15,856 messages). Germany came in last with only 2,331 messages or 2%.

In regard to the participants, Bill for the US came in at number 1 with a total of 9160 spam messages. Italy's Giuseppe and Brazil's Geraldo came in at number 2 and 3. Just as in the country rankings, the difference between the second and third place was rather small. Geraldo needed just 490 more spam messages to catch up to Giuseppe who had a total of 6490. The least spammed participant was John from Australia, who had a total of 3759 messages.

All that amount of spam resulted in all sorts of malware being installed on their machines, as well as a considerable reduction in computing power.

Guy Roberts, director of Avert Labs: "Many of our participants noticed that their computers were slowing down, this means that while they were surfing, unbeknownst to them, Web sites were installing malware. The fact that in just 30 days they commented on a noticeable change in the power of their computers proves just how much malware is being installed without innocent people's knowledge."

The experiment began on the 1st of May 2008 and a total of 50 people took part in it. The McAfee team instructed them to leave all safety precautions aside and surf the web. Of course laptops and e-mail addresses have been generously provided by McAfee. The goal of the experiment was to see how much spam messages would be received over a period of 30 days and how that would influence the user.