This story relates to Google, and also to a month-to-month increase of around 100 percent.  It can hardly be considered positive, however, since the increase corresponds to spam sent from Gmail addresses.

 Google’s CAPTCHA Broken

MessageLabs deserves credit for discovering the rise, which occurred between January and February.  According to the company’s report, "The surge in spam from Gmail accounts follows the pattern seen in July 2007 when it appears attackers developed a similar methodology to circumvent the CAPTCHA mechanisms for Yahoo! and Hotmail email accounts."

Now, for whatever it’s worth to Googlers and people who abhor junk mail, Yahoo, MSN, and Hotmail remain much more common sources of spam.  Also, Google appears anxious to combat security problems; only yesterday, a post titled "How Google keeps your information secure" appeared on the Official Google Blog.

MessageLabs’s finding represents the fall of a major barrier, though, with free email services now being almost universally untrustworthy.  Businesspeople who can be reached at "@gmail.com" may be especially worried – Gmail addresses won’t have the same shine now that spammers are gaining ground.

Going forward, a key thing will be to see if (or how quickly) their advance continues.