Fighting Spam: Google and Microsoft can do better
Interesting article about BBC’s own little investigation into the use of botnets to spam and demonstrating how easy it is to spam (the larger subject of course was cyber-crime).
They basically set up a small botnet and asked the zombied PCs to spam two email accounts they had set up on Gmail and Hotmail.
What caught my eye was the sheer number of spam that got through both Hotmail and Gmail. For their size, I would think both Google and Microsoft could do much better.
Either their spam filtering technology is flawed or they have decided to “loosen up” to reduce false positives . I say this because as was explained in the clip, only the sender and subject of the spam changed. The body remained the same and yet 1,271 messages got through to the hotmail account (5,464 got caught) and 888 got through Gmail (2,948 got caught).
I’m not sure what the final numbers were but the sneak peek was enough to convince me that more could be done.
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