Slashdot Mirror
Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself
An anonymous reader noted that the times is running a piece on the rise in spam that you might have noticed in your inbox over the last 6 months. Gates promised the end of spam by 2006, but they figure it's doubled in the last few months. And best of all, a huge percentage of spam is now images that circumvent traditional text analysis.
Spammers have effectively foiled the first strategy -- analyzing the reputation of the sender -- by conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners. Secure Computing, an antispam company in San Jose, Calif., reports that 250,000 new computers are captured and added to these spam "botnets" each day.
Remember, kids, it's not "infected computers," it's "infected Windows computers."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.