I said it before and I'll say it again: It's all Microsoft's fault. Thanks to the Microsoft swisscheese security model, millions of computers are turned to zombies which in turn send the spam.
Microsoft could very well give free upgrades with improved security models for old boxes - but OH NO, PIRACY! GASP! We must not give the benefit of a secure operating system to those damned overseas pirates!
Thanks to the "genuine advantage" scam, XP users are skipping Microsoft upgrades rather than having to deal with Big Brother taking control of their computers.
Meanwhile, botnets are roaming around the world, running in infected XP machines while their users are oblivious to the fact. How to solve that? Users think that by purchasing antiviruses the problem will be fixed. It's as if botnets and antiviruses formed a very well-thought ecosystem, with the antiviruses relying on the viruses' threat to survive.
Fix the security of the machines, and both will disappear: Botnets will become more and more scarse, and antiviruses will become redundant and disappear for lack of use. Sadly, that doesn't go well with Microsoft struggling to sell us more and more versions of Windows. If Microsoft comes with its own antivirus, antivirus companies will sue.
Spam will not be over until it becomes unprofitable for Microsoft and the antivirus companies to have all those zombies running in the wild. That will only happen if spam quantity becomes exceedingly high. But that won't happen because of the bandwidth costs. The outcome is that spam will increase slowly, as bandwidth costs become lower, and that people will still find it tolerable, as long as they pay for an OS with a slightly improved security and the mandatory antivirus.
For now, all we can do is educate people on spam, botnets, and contribute with our grain of sand by switching to a more secure OS.
