Study Sees Way to Win Spam Fight

NYTimes: For several years, security researchers from two University of California campuses have been reading and responding to spam messages in an effort to find a way to combat the unwanted e-mail. In a new paper, they report that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the products they purchased were processed by just three companies. They conclude that if these companies refused to handle the transactions it would shut down most spam.

While most efforts to counter spam have been technological in nature, the report authors write, "It is the banking component of the spam value chain that is both the least studied and, we believe, the most critical."