Spam fighters losing ground
Computer security analysts who fight spam face the same thankless task as goalkeepers: They don’t get much credit for the unsolicited e-mail they stop, only demerits for the ones that get through. But those few messages that wriggle past increasingly sophisticated filters constitute the greatest threats on the Internet. The messages range from relatively harmless pitches for human growth hormones to ones with malicious code attached that could steal passwords or documents from a machine. The sheer volume of spam still threatens to bring the Internet to a crisis point. Up to 90 percent of all e-mail traffic is spam, a figure that has crept upward in recent years. The forecast isn’t good, either.