Thinking ahead of the spammers

Chasin's background is in computer security; he was also founder, in 1995, of usa.net, the first Web-based email provider. He has spent 11 years watching the spam battles. This last round, the spammers have clearly won. Spam volume always takes a leap upward in late autumn, but this year seems particularly bad.

This year's big innovation: "pump-and-dump image stock spam". You've seen them: inline GIFs above a lot of useless text. The real spam message is the words in the GIF, which advise you to buy some stock or other.

Some 80 percent of spam originates from botnets – megagangs of virus-infected PCs controlled remotely. "This is probably the biggest threat to the Internet since it was created and commercialised. I say this because the botnets have multipurpose payloads. They're polymorphic. We're seeing queen bots, where they can essentially infect a PC and then monitor the anti-virus signature engines and time their propagation."