To hear IBM tell it, though, the new strain of spam is spreading even more quickly. Big Blue announced in January that the number of viruses delivered via e-mail declined by about half from 2004 to 2005 to about 2.8 percent of all e-mail. But phishing attempts tripled, to an average of one in every 304 messages, because of increased use of botnets to generate massive volumes of scam e-mail.
By far, the companies spoofed most frequently by phishing attempts are eBay and PayPal, but banks are getting hit too. "We have to look at the online economy as under attack," Schwartzman says.
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"Even the weak provisions of [the CAN-SPAM Act] are being violated with impunity by spammers every day." |
America, The Spam Leader
One misconception about spam is that it's largely the work of foreigners. In fact, America is the world's biggest spammer. According to Sophos, more spam (23.1 percent) was relayed through the United States than any other country during the first three months of the year -- though China, including Hong Kong, is a close second at 21.9 percent. South Korea is a distant third at 9.8 percent.
Existing laws haven't put much of a dent in America's reign as the king of spam. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) didn't actually make spam illegal, but it prohibits deceptive subject lines and requires that recipients be given an opt-out method.
"We have a very weak federal anti-spam law," says John C. Mozena, co-founder and vice president of CAUCE in the United States. "But even the weak provisions of that law are being violated with impunity by spammers every day. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice and other bodies with enforcement capabilities under CAN-SPAM don't have the resources [to enforce the law]."
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
