One of the few things more irritating than having to challenge with hundreds, if not thousands of vuvuzelas while trying to watch a World Cup game is putting up with spam. And like the vuvuzela, the World Cup seems to be drawing out these irritations, with MessageLabs estimating that 25 percent of global spam is associated to the event.
"Right now, spammers are dependent on the massive wave of enthusiasm and expectation that usually surrounds an event like the FIFA World Cup," said MessageLabs aptitude Senior Analyst, Paul Wood. "Riding this wave, spammers get the attention of their victims by offering products for sale or tempting them to click on a link. It is not rare for the event to appear in the subject line of an email but for the body of the same email to be completely not related."
With the U.S. out of contention, England falling in controversial fashion, and the World Cup as a whole soon coming to an end, this almost certainly won't be the case for very long, but that doesn't mean there will be a sudden reduction in spam. According to the report, nearly nine out of 10 emails are now spam, and in the U.S., exactly 90 percent of email is spam. Engineering is the highest sector for spamming at 94 percent, while Education is a close second at 89.9 percent followed by Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals at 89.7 percent.
June 28, 2010 at 1:04 PM