14 DAY TRIAL // France is considered to be the country with the most malware in Europe and it ranks 10th in the global spam charts, based on recent studies. This is why one could say that the French really have a problem with cyber-security. But recently, they have decided to (at least) fight off spam - their government funded a tool that is going to help shut spammers down.
So, what is it and how does it work? Well, it's a toolbar that you can use to report spam. It's open source and it's designed for Microsoft Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird. As seen on ComputerWorld, this is called "Signal Spam" and it has been built by an Englishman, by the name of John Graham Cunning. This is going to be used by people to notify ISPs when unsolicited mails are coming from their network, as the same site informs.
So, this isn't going to battle spam directly, but rather help gather data. Also, this depends on how much people cooperate, but knowing the users' interest regarding cyber-security, I don't think that they're going to be too successful. In about five months, they've gathered about 3.5 million e-mails in their database. Knowing at what rates spam is being sent nowadays, this is not a large number at all! It's not even noon and I already got 3 spam messages, and my inbox is a fortunate one!
As Graham-Cumming said in a ComputerWorld report, they expect the database to reveal spam trends that could shed light on how to stop the problem. We have studies and researches popping up everyday, but still, they don't help much. Why? Because spam changes a lot! Let me just give you an example - some time ago, I was writing an article about how PDF spam is not being used anymore, because it's inefficient. Looking on the web for more info to back up my statements, I accidentally ran into an article that had been recently written - it was about how spammers have started resorting to PDF files? So as you can see, thing will change before you even know it!