Transcript

>> ANNOUNCER: Welcome to TechWiseTV on the Cisco Interaction Network. Please remember to submit your technical questions in the field provided at the bottom of the viewing console. You can also email questions, comments, and suggestions, to techwisetv@cisco.com. Thank you for joining us, and enjoy the show.

>> JONAS TICHENOR: Hello, and welcome to this edition of TechWiseTV, I'm Jonas Tichenor. Spam is big business. Why? Well, because it pays. It has a very low barrier to entry, and very low upkeep costs. Meantime, it's us who are picking up the tab to the tune of about $10 billion a year in lost productivity, consumption of IT resources and help desk costs, and not to mention the increased network capacity the ISPs have to create to carry all that unwanted traffic. And we all know who ultimately pays for that. A war is being fought between those who use email to work, live, play, and learn, and those who see email as a powerful and profitable threat vector. Here's Cisco solutions expert Robb Boyd with a report.

>> ROBB BOYD: There's no denying that email has lived up to the hype. It's faster, further reaching, and much more convenient, than poor, old fashioned snail mail. But there's a dark side to email, and it's called spam. It now makes up 80% of all email traffic. Why is this stuff so hard to block?

>> CRAIG SPROSTS: So email, by its very nature, is trusting, it's called the simple mail transfer protocol, and when it was first formed, it was not built with any security features.

>> DAVID MAYER: In the SIP RFC, security is mentioned over 50 times just in the first few pages. In the SMTP RFC, security is mentioned zero times.

>> CRAIG SPROSTS: Traditional methods of stopping spam involve two components. Blacklists and whitelists are ineffective simply because the source of spam is changing so rapidly. Content filtering is also ineffective, because it relies on something that spammers themselves can change.

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