Spam Solved
I wrote the following article for InformationWeek. My editor decided not to run it as we'd just posted a similar article from the Associated Press.
"Two years from now, spam will be solved." That's how Bill Gates sees it, according to the AP's account of his comments last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
No doubt Microsoft has some tricks up its sleeve, but not everyone shares such an optimistic view of the world. "I think it will be very tough to eliminate spam," says Matt Dircks, VP of product management for content security company NetIQ Corporation. "It's a noble goal and we certainly want to be part of the initiative to do that, but I think all of us as professionals in this industry, we have to assume that it's not going to happen unless we get much more proactive in managing it."
Even if users awaken to a spam free world, he says administrators will still be dealing with spam.
Jos White, president of managed E-mail security provider MessageLabs Ltd., writes via E-mail, "Gates's claim could very well be realistic, but spam will get worse before it gets better and it will never go away completely."
White believes that as technology companies, legislators, law enforcement officials, industry groups, ISPs and others bring a variety of solutions to the market, spam will wane as the number one IT concern. "But as long as there is money to be made by spamming," he says, "spam and spammers will continue to exist."
Part of the problem with Gates's pronouncement is that the nature of spam is changing. More and more, spam fighters see unsolicited commercial E-mail as one of many security issues, rather than simply a phenomenal waste of time that can be dealt with in isolation. And security hasn't been solved, by Microsoft or by anyone else.
Dircks argues the focus of spam is shifting, and points to the MyDoom worm that has been confounding E-mail users recently. "Theoretically, that's an E-mail worm," he says, "but it's being introduced via spam or other types of propagation methodologies." Another example of the changing nature of spam, he says, is the increasingly popular practice of "phishing," a spam-based scam in which victims are tricked into disclosing bank account numbers, credit card information, and other sensitive data by E-mail messages that lead to deceptive Web sites set up for data theft.
As a result of convergence of spam and security concerns, the anti-spam market is shifting too. "In two years, the anti-spam market will look slightly different than it is today," says White. "We have said repeatedly that anti-spam is not a standalone business." He contends a shakeout is coming in the next few years. "Garter alone estimates that by 2005, there will be no more than five leading providers of anti-spam logic," he says, "and that by the third quarter of 2004, 50 percent of enterprise-class anti-spam applications will cease to exist."
So perhaps Bill Gates is right after all. Spam will be solved in two years. The problem will just have another name by then.
Search
About
Categories
Archives
Syndication Feed