Continued growth in cell phone usage has brought rapid growth in spam messages also and south korean just raised the red flag!

The MIC(Ministry of Information and Communications) released its latest plans on combating cell phone spams based on semi-annual market analysis on 11 July.

According to the MIC’s findings (first half of 2006), average amount of e-mail spam received per person per day dropped from 6.9 to 5.4 but in cell phones, it increased from 0.74 to 0.99.

Annual daily spam receiving analysis

The latest findings reveal that porn spam and regular spam showed slight drop but spams related to financial loans grew (58 percent) rapidly. Consequently, MIC announced its plans to cope with it.

Spam categories in 2006

MIC decided to set a limit on number of SMS (Simple Message Service) sent since the findings show most of the cell phone spam were in SMS. The decision was made based on result of spammer’s abuse on free-unlimited text messaging service offers currently available on the market. The imposed limit will be set based on SMS usages in each phone carriers and within 1,000 messages per user base so the average users won’t be affected.

According to the stats from May 2006, number of users with more than 1,000 text messages sent in a day was 428 with average of 10,200 messages (1 per every 4.23 Seconds). When considering average users can send between 720 to 1,450 per day, decision to limit the numbers to about 1,000 (giving time limit of 30 to 60 second to send per message) is appropriate.

In addition, to improve controlling and tracking spammers, it plans to increase current phony spam trapping cell phone numbers from 1000 to 4000 and any phone numbers that received spam message will be deleted from the system with in 24 hours.

Other plans include, adding span filters and keywords within the cell phone’s feature. The key words will be furnished by KISA (Korea Information Security Agency) upon latest analysis of the spam contents. There are about 180 different models available out on the market with spam filtering features currently and about 60 percent of all cell phone users have access to these features.

As a added measure against combating the spammers, regulations to prosecute illegal spammers bill be tighten up with cooperation from investigative agencies to further beef up the fight. In addition, to stop spammers from changing their traceable phone number, it will be limited to only 2 times in given month.

One affiliate from the related industry commented on the MIC’s latest plan and said, “Wireless communication companies are not the culprit but rather being used as a channel to the spammers. We will be cooperating with the agency’s latest plans thoroughly.”