You don't have to be a member of Mensa to predict if you go around asking for spam you'll get it. But that's exactly what security firm McAfee did with its Spam Experiment conducted in April. The test asked 50 people from ten countries to defy common sense and for 30 days surf the Web on a computer with no anti-spam software. Participants were encouraged "to go where most Internet users would not dare" in an effort to see what would happen. Guess what, they were spammed.
The spam test results, released today, are predictable. In total participants received 104,832 spam e-mail messages or about 2096 each during the 30 days. Most of those who received spam were in the U.S. followed by Brazil and then Italy. Men received more spam than women.
More Spam-tastic Statistics
As far are spam specimens financial spam was the most popular type of spam followed by solicitations for unwanted products and services, health and medical spam, and forth porn spam.
McAfee's conclusions: The spam business is still thriving and spammers will stop at nothing. McAfee also confirmed spam and cyber crime are linked and non-English spam is growing. One bright spot reports McAfee, is that mobile spam has yet to "really take off."
This was a lite experiment, though 50 PC's globally is much more than a number of companies would do.
The question is - was this study designed to (a) increase everyone's knowledge about the problem and how to deal with spam or (b) get McAfee some more press under the guise of "thought leadership".?
Given that nothing nothing new was really discovered, in the words of Ashton Kutcher, I think publications devoting a whole lot of space to this have been P(R)unked. A few more print/sound bites for McAfee's executives.