This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to November 2003, when spam was such a hot topic that VB decided to launch a dedicated 'VB Spam Supplement'.
While, today, spam is a problem that is generally very well mitigated, 12 years ago it was a subject of growing concern and was becoming of increasing interest
to the AV industry, with a veritable stampede of AV vendors rushing to bring anti-spam solutions to market alongside their anti-virus products.
With volumes of unsolicited email growing almost by the
day, there was great interest in the ways in which users were
affected by it, so in November 2003, VB decided to launch the 'VB Spam Supplement', a section of Virus Bulletin magazine that would be dedicated to news and articles on spam and anti-spam techniques.
In the first edition of the VB Spam Supplement, we heard that the ratio of spam to non-spam messages had recently exceeded the 50% mark — representing a huge 40.6% increase over the
preceding 12 months. Meanwhile, in the first Spam Supplement feature, anti-spam software engineer Martin Lee summarized from a UK perspective the various legislative attempts
to ban the abuse of email by law, concluding that, while legislation can assist in identifying clearly what is and what is not acceptable, "ultimately, while there is money to be made through the sending of spam, this
is not a problem that is going to go away any time soon".
