It's no secret who's guilty. The Spamhaus Project, a London-based nonprofit that tracks spammers worldwide, posts its own Top 10 list of "the worst of the career spammers causing the most damage on the Internet currently," including their names, aliases, and operations.
But prosecutions can be costly. Microsoft, for example, has found them a losing proposition. John Scarrow, general manager of Microsoft's anti-spam and anti-phishing strategy team, says the company has filed 112 anti-spam lawsuits in U.S. courts and has been awarded more than $869 million in judgments, but it spends much more money in court costs than it receives in settlements.
Hidden Costs
Some Internet service providers (ISPs) insist there's no need to worry. Why? Because they judge their success rate by consumer response, and complaints are few nowadays. A "report spam" button in many mail programs lets users inform their ISP if spam reaches their inbox. With this outlet, consumers are less likely to complain about spam. At the same time, spam filters have gotten better, which means less spam is reaching users' inboxes in the first place.
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AOL member complaints about spam have dropped 75 percent since November 2003, according to Mike Jones, director of AOL's anti-spam operations. "As an industry, we're doing a better job of keeping [spam] away from members," says Jones. Still, he acknowledges the side effects. "Spam causes a multitude of problems, not just man hours but system resources" to deal with it.
Even if the unwanted messages are blocked from reaching inboxes, they still eat up bandwidth. Geist, the University of Ottawa professor, figures that if 80 percent of e-mail is spam, "then four out of five e-mail servers are there to deal with spam, not to deal with legitimate mail." Neither AOL nor Microsoft would disclose how much it spends to fight spam.
That doesn't count the costs facing corporate IT staffs, who typically buy third-party spam filters to protect their networks. Microsoft's Scarrow estimates that spam accounts for about two-thirds of corporate e-mail traffic.
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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.
