There was an interesting article at bbc.co.uk the other day.An experiment by the computer security company McAfee found that surfing the web unprotected for a month will leave the average surfer 70 spam e-mails per day. One study participant received 5,414 spam messages during the trial.
McAfee invited 50 people around the world to participate in their study. Participants in the United States fared the worst, receiving a total of 23,233 spam e-mails during the one month trial.
"The results show that spam is showing no signs of slowing down, although the opposite can be said of those receiving messages.
"Many of our participants noticed that their computers were slowing down. This means that while they were surfing, unbeknownst to them, websites were installing malware," said Guy Roberts, director of McAfee's labs in Europe.
Some 8% of the total spam received during the experiment was classified as phishing e-mails - messages that pose as a trustworthy source as a way of getting sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and bank account details." --bbc.co.uk
From the article:
Number of spam messages received:
- US - 23,233
- Brazil - 15,856
- Italy - 15,610
- Mexico - 12,229
- UK - 11,965
- Australia - 9,214
- The Netherlands - 6,378
- Spain - 5,419
- France - 2,597
- Germany - 2,331
Top ten most common spam categories:
- Advertisements
- Financial
- Health and medicine
- Adult services
- Free stuff
- Education
- IT related
- Money making
- Credit cards
- Watch adverts
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