The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) is taking the fight against unsolicited
commercial e-mail to Asia next month, where it will hold a meeting
to discuss the priorities for its newly created task force on
spam.
The task force will encourage best practices in industry,
promote technical measures to combat spam and facilitate
cross-border law enforcement, the OECD said.
It will also co-ordinate international policy, bringing together
the many national bodies that have competencies in the field.
The task force will take two years to study and develop a tool
kit of strategies to combat spam, including authentication and
network management technologies as well as public awareness
campaigns.
The group will consider how to manage spam sent via mobile
phones or instant messaging networks.
South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication will
host a workshop early next month to set priorities for the task
force.
OECD member states last discussed co-ordinating their antispam
activities in February at a meeting in Brussels hosted by the
European Commission.
A recent survey by CipherTrust found that almost 29% of the IP
addresses sending spam to a sample of 1,000 US businesses in May,
June and July were in South Korea - although they accounted for
only 3% of the total volume of spam messages.
Around 86% of the spam messages identified in the survey
originated from IP addresses in the US.
Peter Sayer writes for IDG News Service