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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has released a report on their findings of “malicious spam and phishing”, called “Spam Summit: The Next Generation of Threats and Solutions”, and has proposed actions that can be taken in order to mitigate the harmful affects that are caused by fraudulent phishing and spam. Also included in this report is an overview of how the FTC has been protecting users from spam and phishing for over a decade, and the results that were obtained during the agency’s 2007 Harvesting and Filtering Study.

During this study it was confirmed that spam is becoming more of a major contributor to the distribution of malware worldwide, and is increasing the number of financial crimes. While criminal law agencies are continuing to battle these malicious spammers by shutting down their operations, industries will need to employ technological solutions of their own to help fight malicious spam and phishing. Some of the solutions mentioned by the FTC include email authentication and email reputation services. The vote to officially authorize this report passed with a vote of 5-0.

The conclusion to the report says:

“This study indicates that spammers continue to harvest email addresses posted on websites
and, to a much lesser extent, those posted on other website locations such as chatrooms, message
boards, social network sites, and video posting sites.

The fact that the vast majority of spam sent to harvested addresses in this study was never
delivered to consumers’ inboxes demonstrates the relative effectiveness of the two ISPs’ spam
filters. This result suggests that anti-spam technologies continue to have a significant impact on
reducing the volume of spam delivered to consumers’ inboxes.”

To view the report in full Click Here.

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