New International Group, StopSpamAlliance, Targets Spammers

Spam faces a new foe with the formation of an international group to exchange tactics and legal information.

The StopSpamAlliance website launched on Tuesday, the result of a plan hatched at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) meeting in Tunis, Tunisia, in November 2005.

The alliance brings together several organizations to better coordinate efforts to stop spammers, who frequently frustrate law enforcement efforts by running operations across borders. Despite better filtering and blocking, spam continues to clog the Internet, sucking up bandwidth and spreading malicious programs.

Those participating in the alliance are the Telecommunications and Information Working Group of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the European Union’s Contact Network of Spam Authorities, the International Telecommunication Union, the London Action Plan, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Seoul/Melbourne Memorandum of Understanding group.

The website will contain content on antispam laws, enforcement efforts, consumer and business education plus best practices, according to the site. The site also has a calendar of events related to spam fighting.

Estimates of spam volumes vary. SoftScan U.K., a security company that offers hosted e-mail filtering services, said on Tuesday that 89 percent of the e-mails it filtered throughout October were spam.

-Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service (London Bureau)

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• Tricky New Malware Challenges Security Vendors

• Pump-and-Dump Spam Turns Subliminal

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