Defending Against Spam

When it comes to online security, some key threats are getting better and yet remain serious problems. Take spam, for example.

Jeff Fox, Consumer Reports' Technology Editor, is today presenting evidence to the Spam Summit, a Federal Trade Commission event on this ongoing Net menace. (Note: The link will take you directly to the FTC's Web site for the summit.) Drawing on findings from the 2007 Consumer Reports State of the Net report, which includes a nationally representative survey of U.S. Web users, Jeff's paper offers both hope and alarm about the spam scourge.

Spam is easing, our survey found. The proportion of spam recipients who said half or more of their e-mail was spam dipped below 50 percent for the first time since our survey began  in 2004. Also, fewer people reported clicking on links in spam or replying to it. (Click on the image on the left to see our findings.) And the use of spam blockers and firewalls is more widespread.

But spammers are still making sales from their messages and ensnaring people with phishing scams, in which bogus e-mails and Web sites induce people to disclose information about their financial accounts. Based on our survey, we estimate that 650,000 Americans made such a purchase in the month before the survey. And the proportion of Web users who are responding to phishing messages has remained steady. (Click on the image on the right for a closer look at our findings.)

What to do? Jeff recommends a continued effort to educate Web users, since some of the good news from our survey (fewer clicks on links, for example) proves that education can help. He also advocates steps to boost the effectiveness of the federal CAN-SPAM Act, which has given law enforcers new tools to use against spammers. The FTC also needs adequate resources to take full advantage of the U.S. Safe Web Act, which allows that agency more authority to work internationally to protect consumers. For their part, software manufacturers need to design firewalls that clearly identify name a product that is attempting outgoing communications, rather than using a hard-to-identify file name. In addition, Microsoft needs to fix its Vista firewall. (See our previous post on Window Vista's flawed firewall.)

We'll have more on spam and other threats--both good news and bad, problems and solutions--in the State of the Net 2007 report, and in its accompanying Ratings report on software to protect against viruses, spyware, and spam. Both reports will post to ConsumerReports.org in early August.

In the meantime, you can find out more helpful information about how to protect your computer and your personal information by visiting our special cyber-security section and our Ratings of computer security software programs.

-- Paul Reynolds

—Paul Eng