14 DAY TRIAL // Spam. Oh, the incredible annoying email messages coming into my email account and advertising all kinds of things? They must be stopped, somehow. But Google, the owner of Gmail, one of the top technologies when it comes to web-based email, says the next years will come with less spam messages. Hope so. According to Wired, Brad Taylor, software engineer at Google, believes the number of the unsolicited messages coming into our accounts will be reduced in the next few years while it is currently "flat". Since there are no numbers provided, let me disagree with him. In the recent period, huge amounts of spam messages were delivered to millions of emails from all over the world.
And when I'm talking about spam, I'm not referring only to the email messages promoting things like Viagra, Rolex watches or other drugs. The spam messages can often contain spyware or malicious links which turn them into scam or phishing attacks. A recent report revealed that a group of spammers, codenamed Celebrity Spammers, is responsible for an important percentage of the total spam avalanche currently on the web. Some say they are close to the Storm attack which affected millions of users from all over the world.
In the same time, several hackers break into large databases and steal contact information for millions of users. The next step? Selling the details on the web and let other attackers spam the affected consumers.
"I'm seeing that the overall trend is up. We're not seeing a drastic increase, though. And we're also seeing an increase of targeted spam instead of blanket spam that hits everybody in a large population. Today, for instance, you see spam messages on saving (on) prescription drugs targeted to seniors," Chenxi Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research, told Wired.
Gmail has always included powerful antispam filters which managed to protect users' accounts of spam and malicious messages. Even so, there are no less than 1065 spam messages in my account, most of them coming in the last 30 days.