95% of User-Generated Content Is Bogus

coomaria writes "The HoneyGrid scans 40 million Web sites and 10 million emails, so it was bound to find something interesting. Among the things it found was that a staggering 95% of User Generated Content is either malicious in nature or spam." Here is the report's front door; to read the actual report you'll have to give up name, rank, and serial number.

Comments

Re:It might be true, but it's also irrelevent.

[Trepidity]

It seems that at least as well as anyone can estimate, the current population really is about 5% of the total humans who've ever lived.

Re:It might be true, but it's also irrelevent.

[steelfood]

It's plausible that the past 100 years has had more people alive than all of human history

And that would still make the current population only a little more than 50% of all that people that have been alive.

Except considering that homo sapiens have been around for several hundred thousand years, I think your estimates for the number of humans that have ever walked the planet may be a bit low.

Re:This just in

[timeOday]

This has almost nothing to do with websites like Wikipedia, which people actually look at. Spammers create huge sets of keyword-laden wikis and other web pages, which all link to each other, for the purpose of fooling search engines that use PageRank and similar algorithms. To search engines, it's hard to differentiate this from a popular site with lots of users. But when you see these pages you know it immediately, like spam in your inbox.

It is no different than domain names. Type a random sequence of 4 characters .com, and the vast majority of times you will get some fairly innocuous spam site, e.g. dneo.com (picked at random), with no real content.

But it doesn't interfere much with most poeple's use of the web.

95% of the story is bogus

[gmuslera]

The original article say that they scan 40 millon sites an 10 millon emails each hour, and they are refering to thjis report (that also links to the full info, and video of the presentation of that info).

Matters a lot how they get their "sample", honeypots, honeyclients, reputation systems and "advanced grid computing systems" (whatever it is). What is feeding information to that sample? Not old sites with rightful content sitting around since years ago, but in good part spammers, botnets, and people that want that your pc forms part of one. And mail is already known that is 95% spam. The sample is just too rigged to be at all related with what really is in internet or what you have some chance to see.

Re:This just in

[VoltageX]

Sorry to hijack this, but http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Assets/WSL_ReportQ3Q4FNL.PDF seems to be the direct link to the paper.