The EU has voiced its concern regarding growing levels of spam and warned that if the problem is not sorted out by its member states using existing legislative tools, new legislation will have to be adopted. According to Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media: “it is time to turn the repeated political concern about spam into concrete actions to fight spam.”
Recent estimates suggest that spam levels are currently standing between 50% and 90% of all email traffic, making it a priority problem for a world hooked on electronic communication. An official communication on spam by the European Commission endorses that view and says that junk email has had a global cost of €39 billion in 2005. Europe’s largest economies have also been hit hard by the problem, with spam costing €3.5 billion to Germany, €1.9 billion to the UK and €1.4 billion to France.
The biggest single source of spam at the current moment is the US, which is the source of just over 21% of junk email. China is the second culprit. China. However, Europe as a whole gives the world a third of its spam at 32%, overtaken by Asia as a region, which churns out 34% of the world’s junk email. Currently the problem has outgrown its earlier status of simple nuisance, particularly as criminal networks have began using it to commit fraud on a global scale. Additionally, apart from the traditional spam subjects of fake medicines and degrees, last year brought an explosion in the number of “pump and dump” fraud attacks. This is where criminals tout low value market stocks, make a tidy profit on the sudden price jump and then leave victims to pay for the comedown.
Current detection and prevention technology has recently struggled with the increased share of image-based spam that presents the message in an email as an image, thus fooling some spam filters. In terms of simple statistics the rise in spam over the last months has been nothing short of dramatic: one source counted 2.5 billion junk emails in June, rising to 7 billion in November. Despite these numbers, the EU has found several examples to follow in their fight against spam. A Dutch anti-spam program has been highlighted as a cost-effective measure that could lead to an 85% reduction in spam after an investment of just €570,000. The EU has also urged all parties to enhance international links and cross border cooperation in the face of this global problem. Initiatives such as the Contact Network of Spam Authorities, the London Action Plan and an OECD-backed program are already functioning, but more is needed. A body that unites authorities from all major “spam producing” countries would certainly seem to be a major step in the right direction, but the EU report stops short of recommending the creation of such a body. It has, however, warned all EU states that if levels of spam were not reduced by 2007 following the Dutch model and using the existing ePrivacy Directive, new legislation may have to be introduced. A warning has also been sounded to the electronic communications industry to clean up its act and start applying “proper filtering policies”. Spammers beware.
