spam
30 Years of “SPAM”
Last May 3, 2008 marked the 30th years for spam. No not the popular canned staple food but those unsolicited email in our inboxes. Thirty years ago, the phenomenon that was to grow exponentially and become known as spam was born. But despite three decades to learn our lessons, it seems many people still get fooled in to buying products sent to their email inboxes without request.
According to Yahoo News, on May 3rd 1978, a marketer for DEC, a now defunct U.S.computer company, sent out a message to 400 email addresses. The spam, though it wasn’t known as spam then.
The industry which has grown up around the practice has changed somewhat since the 1970s, when the Internet was still the US government-run Arpanet. Which the sender in 1978 had to input each of those 400 email address individually and by hand, whereas now, the whole operation is handled remotely via bot nets.
The practice became known as spam in the 1980s, after the famous Monty Python sketch where a cafe sells Spam meat with everything. This leads a group of invading Vikings to sing the Spam song, which includes the repeating of the word Spam over and over again.
Symantec Awarded Funding from European Commission for Third Long-Term Research Project
CUPERTINO, Calif., April 2, 2008 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that the European Commission has awarded funding to Symantec for collaborative research in Internet threats. The three-year project, known as the Worldwide Observatory of Malicious Behaviours and Attack Threats (WOMBAT), aims at providing new means to understand the existing and emerging threats that are targeting the Internet economy and its users. Symantec’s new Symantec Research Lab – Europe at Sophia Antipolis in the south of France will work in collaboration with the WOMBAT consortium to gain better insight into Internet threats and malicious code trends.
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