March 10, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Spam originating from Google’s Gmail doubled last month from 1.3 percent of all spam email to 2.6 percent, said email security vendor MessageLabs (messagelabs.com) on Monday.
The significant increase shows that spammers are still managing to seep past “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” – the security test that uses distorted text as a way of blocking mass registration of email accounts and other spamming techniques.
CAPTCHA continues to be outsmarted by spammers and will soon find itself “comprehensively defeated”, said MessageLabs senior analyst Paul Wood. In February, security vendor “Websenseascertainedthat” spammers used two Web hosts to crack Gmail’s CAPTCHAs – a technique that proved to be successful only 20 percent of the time. However, when spammers repeat the same method thousands of times, several new accounts can be created to be used for sending spam.
While antispam software can easily block spam domains, most businesses are not willing to close off the domains of free Web mail providers since many legitimate emails stem from these providers, said Wood.
Spam coming from Web mail providers accounts for 4.2 percent of all spam. And while Google’s CAPTCHA system is difficult to crack, Yahoo’s was also once considered the same, but is now consistently defeated. Currently, 88.7 percent of the spam from free Web mail providers stems from Yahoo’s domains.
In related news, Microsoft’s CAPTCHA, which is used for registering accounts on its Windows Live Mail service, has also been cracked. The same spammers are responsible for defeating both Google and Microsoft’s system, said Websense.
Last month, a divided Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the conviction of a notorious North Carolinian spammer does not violate free-speech rights.
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