Almost a Third of Consumers Respond To Spam
By Anna Johnson on July 23rd, 2009If you’ve ever wondered why you continue getting so much spam – when we all know it’s such garbage – the answer may lie in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group’s (MAAWG) finding that almost a third of consumers respond to messages they suspect might be spam.
Yep, that’s just about one in three people!
Furthermore, in its recent study ‘A Look at Consumers’ Awareness of Email Security and Practices’ MAAWG also found that consumers were astonishingly ignorant of the risks posed to their computers by responding to spam.
Around 80 percent of users doubted their computers were at risk of ever being infected with a ‘bot’ – a covertly planted virus capable of sending spam or causing other damage without their knowledge.
Since these bots are largely responsible for generating much of today’s illegitimate email, it’s not far-fetched to assume that one in three consumers are not just keeping the spam industry alive and well… they are actually contributing to the industry (albeit unintionally).
MAAWG’s study was based on interviews with 800 computer users in the United States and Canada who said they were not ‘security experts’ and who used email addresses that were not managed by a professional IT department.
While not ‘security experts’ about two-thirds of those surveyed considered themselves ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ knowledgeable in Internet security.
Scary stuff, and maybe we’d all do well to encourage each other to take steps to avoid spam… and certainly not to respond to it.
