CAMPBELL, Ca. – Barracuda Networks is predicting that the poor economy, as well as the growing use of botnets, will give spam volume a bump, sending it slightly higher than 95 percent in 2009.

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the CAN-SPAM act, but it hasn’t had a great impact on reducing spam, said Stephen Pao, vice president of product management at Barracuda Networks. Instead, what it has done is provided a set of rules that delineate between right and wrong in e-mail advertising and marketing, he noted. While Pao said CAN-SPAM represented some good rules for e-mail advertising, it didn’t stop illegitimate spammers as much as people may have originally expected.

“I think that what’s really happened is the nature of spam is actually changing quite a bit. One of the things is spam is really right now an industry itself,” Pao said.

While the most elite spamming techniques were once reserved for people who could afford to spend a lot of money on the software or on research and development time, now anyone can rent a botnet, he said. Botnets are being provided as a service, enabling anyone with the desire to get the latest spamming techniques, he said.

“What we’re seeing right now is a lot of the sophisticated techniques for sending out spam that were really restricted to only the crimeware elite are broadening much more to a broad spectrum of those who want to use spam,” Pao said.

The economy is also helping to drive the spam industry. Consumers are now more likely to buy the products being promoted by spam, he said. For instance, in an economic downturn, someone may turn to spam to get a fake Rolex instead of buying the real thing or try out the cheaper pharmaceutical drug alternatives being touted by spam e-mails, he said.

“When you don’t have a job, an online degree sounds like a really great thing,” said Pao, who noted that the fake online degree industry has turned to spam to market its services.

Meanwhile, other spammers are turning away from the practice. In a bull market, penny stock scams work because the spam e-mails can get a lot of people to create a trading volume, but in a poor economy, it doesn’t make as much sense for them, Pao said.

Although spam is on the rise, Pao noted that legitimate e-mail volume is also on the rise.

However, more countries are becoming providers of spam. In the last months of the year, Brazil and Turkey both entered the top 10 spam country lists, slipping into the number two and number five spots, respectively.

“Turkey was kind of a surprise,” Pao said. In fact, it was such a surprise that Barracuda double-checked its own data to make sure it was accurate. It was. Other anti-spam vendors started placing Turkey on the top 10 list about the same time, he said.

Emerging market countries, including the usual suspects of China and Russia, don’t have the same security measures in place as the U.S. and Western Europe. The proliferation of hosting providers and residential broadband in those countries only adds to the amount of spam being generated. Pao noted that the U.S. and Western Europe went through the same growing pains years ago.

For channel resellers, these developing markets present tremendous opportunity, Pao said. Within those countries, there is an increase in the number of Barracuda products being sold, he said. As the spam problem becomes worse in such countries, the providers are looking for ways to solve problems, and that creates opportunities for channel resellers and vendors in the space, he said.

This column was written by Chris Talbot of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

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