I came across McAfee's Spam Trends in 2009 article, as reported by PC1news.com. In the article, they summarize some of McAfee's predictions about where spam is going to go in 2009. Most of the predictions are actually extensions of trends that we saw in 2008:
There is one additional point I need to respond to that doesn't make sense.
Spammers are also going to abuse free email services more often and more severely than they used to do before. As a result, the need for Domain Keys Identification Mail (DKIM), PGP key signing and secondary authentication mechanisms will become more important to a basic business security model.
¿Qué?
What does authentication have to do with combating the abuse of free email services? If a free email provider like Hotmail, AOL, Gmail or Yahoo get compromised, DKIM won't save you. The recipient spam filter already knows that the message is coming from these services. In fact, that's the inherent weakness of reputation filters; if someone with a good reputation is compromised and spam leaks through it (in small volumes) you cannot rely on reputation to block the mail. Instead, you need to rely on content filtering to examine the message's contents to make judgements upon whether or not it is spam or should be delivered.
Indeed, in this case, a reputation filter can weaken your spam filter if you apply it incorrectly. How? If you assume that all mail that comes from Gmail, as authenticated using DKIM, is good and enter them into a safe senders list, then any spam coming from there will get a free pass to the user's inbox.
You may reply "No, no, we'll only apply safe senders to known good senders and be extra aggressive on the other stuff." This is the Holy Grail of spam filtering, but unfortunately, it doesn't work in practice. The whole point of email is that it allows you to hear from people you have never heard from before. All I have ever found is that if you increase a spam filter's aggression, you simply apply higher spam scores to spam you would have caught anyhow and much more legitimate mail gets filtered as false positives. The spam that you were trying to catch still gets through because it evades your filters. The components that your spam filters are looking for haven't been updated to look for this new type of spam.
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