Tag Archive: Graham Cluley

Doubtless you spent yesterday celebrating the birthday of spam. Yes, it was May 1, 1978 when Gary Thuerk of DEC spent the first spam e-mail on the Internet’s ancestor, Arpanet. But securitycompany Sophos thinks that three decades is long enough, and has begun Spam Pledge to try and eradicate spam. Good luckon that.   "Gary Thuerk could never have imagined what he was starting when he sent that mass email 30 years ago," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos,said."There is a generation of people today who have never worked in a world without spam clogging up their inboxes. What’s worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious, aiming to stealbank account information or install malware. People who buy goods via spam are merely perpetuating the problem for all users and must be stopped."   What Sophos hopes to achieve by SpamPledge is to stop people responding to spam, and that means either buying what the mails offer or clicking on the links. Perhaps remarkably, a recent survey conducted by the company revealed that 11%of respondents said they’d actually bought items via spam mail.   Sophos has even created a Facebook Spam Pledge group, and a YouTube video (which could possibly be a bit tongue in cheek) of people taking the Spam Pledge.

From the Sophos press release:

Sophos has published a report into the countries from which spam messages originate. Researchers scanned all spam messages received over two days last week and have revealed a ‘dirty dozen’ of offending countries with the United States topping the chart.

The ‘dirty dozen’ are as follows:  Read more...