One of the most frustrating things about the Internet has been the rise of spam. These unwanted e-mails choke our networks, steal precious storage space and in recent years have become the delivery vehicle for any number of malicious types of payloads intended to cause all kinds of harm.
The fight against spam has seen its ups and downs over the years. Every now and again it feels like we're making progress, which usually occurs after somebody installs a new spam appliance that sports some sort of new enhanced algorithm for filtering out spam. But sooner or later, spammers adjust their methods to compensate for the new approaches to fighting spam and our e-mail systems once again start to fill up with junk.
The core problem seems to be that we're dependent on developing signatures to track various approaches to spam the same way that we track signatures of viruses. But there are lot more approaches to spam than there are viruses, so by some estimates we might need to track as many as 2.5 million spam signatures within the next year.
Most anti-spam solutions can never be 100 percent effective given that challenge and, over time, the weight of keeping track of all those signatures will overwhelm the amount of processing power that can be brought to bear on the problem at a reasonable cost. Much of this thinking is behind most of the efforts to shift the processing weight of security to the cloud. But even there all we've done is moved the burden rather than solve the problem.
News 1 year ago
