Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: Taking out the trash
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Receiving spam is a bit like having junk mail pushed through the letterbox. Annoying. I’ve lost count of the times a Betterware catalogue has landed on the Welcome mat over the years. Sometimes I try to be nice by leaving it out with a polite note saying ‘No thanks’. Of course, it never works and they leave another one a few weeks later. Throw it in the bin and they’ll still leave a replacement. It’s hopeless.

And don’t even get me started on the flyers for the takeaway pizza joint up the road. Who are they kidding? Buy a 12” Margherita from that place and you’ll get more nutritional value from eating the box it arrives in.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I reported here on how my inbox was being taken over by a similarly tiresome torrent of unwanted junk in the shape of spam emails. I never even reply to these messages, but it seems plenty of us do. As a result, we are feeding the spammers.

Tired of spam? Let us know on the message boards how you get around it.
Unlikely to stop
“Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to stop everyone from buying goods sold via spam,” Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley told me back then.

This led me to give Norton Internet Security 2008 a try, despite fearing it would slow my machine to a crawl. The box has a sticker that says ‘New with faster performance’. Hmm. I’ve had a love/hate affair with these programs for years, often uninstalling them in sheer frustration with how they perform.

My current software of choice, AVG’s Internet Security package, has been pretty good to be honest and goes about its business in the background quite nicely. However, I’m looking at something a little more potent, even if it does mean sacrificing performance.
Rise in spam
It was an email from Sophos that finally convinced me to beef up my PC’s protection. According to its latest research, only one in 28 emails are now legitimate – with a disturbing rise in spam recorded between April and June this year.

Sophos has a Dirty Dozen list of countries that relay spam, a register headed up by none other than the US of A followed by Russia. But there are some surprising inclusions in there too, like Turkey, which came third in the list.

Depressingly, the Sophos stats also revealed the level of spam being relayed to businesses had risen to a staggering 96.5% of all email. That’s before we get to the likes of SMS text spamming and spear phishing, the latter of which often plunders social networking sites like Facebook in the voracious quest for identity fraud.

Simple to install
Norton’s Internet Security package is simple enough to install and set up but it’s a bit odd to find the anti-spam facet comes as an add-on. Why? “Many of our customers already benefit from anti-spam technology through their internet service providers,” says Con Mallon, Symantec's consumer marketing product director.
“So we removed the anti-spam feature from our core Norton Internet Security and AntiVirus packages. There’s a trade-off between protection and performance. We’ve kept the core products as lean as possible to minimise their impact on the PC’s performance, while still giving customers the choice to download the free, optional Norton add-on pack.”

Performance issues
So far, the package has performed quite well, and I’ve noticed a marked decrease in spam. But it seems unlikely we’ll see those performance issues eradicated entirely, simply because of the size of the problem.

“Traditionally, security solutions have grown in size as the number of security threats has increased,” says Mallon. “Security vendors have needed to include more and more features to ensure that their customers are protected.

“This has often caused a notable impact on the PC’s performance as the security solution has demanded more computing resources.”
“For our next set of releases of Norton Internet Security and Norton AntiVirus, due to be released in September, we’ve set ourselves an audacious objective of ‘zero-impact’ security. We’re challenging ourselves to develop the best security package with, quite literally, no impact on the PC’s performance.” More sophisticated
“Web-based threats and attacks are the latest and fastest growing vector of security concern,” furthers Mallon on the increasingly sophisticated methods being used by the online criminal fraternity.

“Drive-by downloads for instance, where an authentic website is injected with malicious codes that infects any visitor to that site, are one of the most common ways that a Trojan or other malware can enter a PC and gain access to confidential information. This is then relayed back to the cyber criminal for exploitation and financial gain.”
The 2008 version also boasts Norton Identity Safe, a new feature that allows customers to store their personal credentials (such as login and password details) in an encrypted format on their PC.

Ongoing battle
When logging onto selected websites, this feature automatically fills in the relevant credentials ensuring that this information cannot be intercepted by criminals. A great idea, but in the end it’s going to take a lot more than new features to combat such a huge problem.

“To fight spam, you really need to have a worldwide approach and significant political will,” adds Mallon. “There appears to be little prospect of that happening in the short term. Laws may help to address some of the ‘symptoms’ of spam, but not the ‘disease’ itself. Spam really needs to be tackled on all fronts and it’ll be an ongoing battle.”



Recent columns from Rob Clymo:

The in-car camera that spots bad driving
Better online service, please!
Waging war on spam


All Rob Clymo's columns for Tech & Gadgets

Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.