|  Spam
deletes us of $1000 a year
Spam costs each Australian
worker $1000 of their time a year, an industry expert said today.
Internet Industry Association chief executive Peter Coroneos said
68 per cent of emails received by Australian workers were spam.
Overseas estimates have put the figure as high as 95 per cent, including
error messages and viruses.
Coroneos said while the volume of spam was levelling off, spammers
were masking their mail to look like a real exchange. Instead of
sending just one email, a spammer will send three slightly different
ones to confuse the receiver into believing they were involved in
a string of email correspondence. Coroneos said the tricks meant
spam was taking longer to identify and sapping more than ever out
of people's days. "As a result of increasing sophistication,
the time Australians are spending deleting spam is going up because
it's harder to detect," he said.
"You could put a figure at over $1000 per employee per year
now. In fact, I'm just deleting my daily spam allowance."
Email security firm Return Path said 99 per cent of the computers
it monitors that send email have been taken over by spammers or
virus writers. Analysis of the contents of millions of emails has
revealed that less than 4 per cent is legitimate traffic. Return
Path reached its estimate by calculating a "reputation score"
for the 20 million net addresses of those machines. The score was
derived by analysing the email traffic sent through those addresses,
the number of complaints filed about that address, and if the owner
of that address responds to complaints.
Anti-virus firm Sophos has revealed the US tops the list of nations
where most spam starts its journey across the net. Sophos found
23.2 per cent of spam originates there. This month, the Australian
industry launched a spam code of conduct that is backed up by the
threat of $1 million a day in fines to spammers.
|
 |
 Latest
articles
Microsoft's
Google Challenge
Yahoo
Boasts Size of Its Search Engine Index
Melbourne
IT 2005 half-year results
Google's
New World Order
|
 |
 |
