Secur-alysis

The Truth About Spam

November 14, 2008 by Antivirus Ware.com

Have you ever gotten any unsolicited emails offering you everything from magic formulas to lose weight, to chances to get rich quick, to enhancing parts of your anatomy whether your gender even has those parts? If you use the Internet, you’re probably used to it by now. It’s an accepted fact of online life, and it’s known far and wide as “spam.”

Given how many people bombard your email inbox with spam, you’d probably think it’s an incredibly effective way to sell a product. Yet researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and University of California at San Diego have done a little experiment. It turns out it takes a lot of spam to get a result. Response rates are typically not very good. Is it good enough to make money?

The researchers set out to find out. They ran two fake spam campaigns, one mimicking a fake virus and the other mimicking a phishing campaign. How bad was the response? After sending out almost 350 million email messages, there were only 28 attempts at a sale. These would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a little over $100 a day over the course of the study.

Antivirus software can’t protect you from spam, but it can prevent you from receiving the viruses, malware and spyware that may be attached to spam. To keep your computer safe, you need to be careful to choose an anti virus software with a solid reputation.