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 Spam today: more information
September 29, 2004 - Part I
State of modern Internet at a glance
In recent years, the Internet has greatly matured. Our life today has become impractical without it. Even people who don't use the Internet extensively often have an urgent need to log on to find necessary information, receive email, download multimedia content (music, movies, pictures) or to update their software. The Internet is a universal tool, a source of unlimited knowledge and possibilities, and people who know how to use it effectively find it increasingly helpful. It is in fact a gift to humanity, one of the world's wonders.
However, the Internet has a flip side; many people find it difficult to use and even unsafe. They are concerned with an increasing trend of Internet fraud, the presence of irrelevant and sometimes obscene content on web pages, as well as the state of Internet privacy and security. Increasing numbers of cyber criminals stalk the Internet and rob people of their belongings and independence.
Cyber crooks have devised many sophisticated tricks and mechanisms to make lives of their peaceful counterparts more difficult, dangerous and poorer. They've created new forms of Internet assaults: computer viruses and worms, dangerous "malware" codes, access-denying web attacks and SPAM harassments. Online computer crime has touched too many of us to stay unrecognized.
In order to secure our visitors from these attacks and schemes, we try to familiarize them with every conceivable form of online misbehavior. Our focus for this article is the issue of SPAM.
In my previous material on the subject of SPAM, I outlined some basic concerns and provided techniques to defend yourself. The present article gives it a more comprehensive exposure. The need to supply new material on this issue is prompted by the surge of SPAM proliferation, poor users' awareness and an insufficient level of protection mounted on the part of most users and organizations.
As you may well know, SPAM is defined as unsolicited, junk e-mail sent to you by a person you don't know; it's an email usually containing a marketing message trying to get you to purchase some product or service. This basically means any correspondence to which I haven't explicitly agreed, any unwanted form of mail, any messages being shoved at me, and those I can't figure out how to stop. Of course, everyone might have his or her own definition of SPAM, but most agree that SPAM is destructive (it slows the entire Internet and it lessens our concept of email as an effective medium of communication), is obsessive, dangerous and costly. The average person, when asked to define SPAM, might cite specific types of offensive or fraudulent email solicitations-a relentless stream of Viagra ads or the creatively punctuated Nigerian scams. Others might include chain letters or newsletters in which you have long since lost interest. Still others consider any sort of advertisement from any source, legitimate or not, to be SPAM. Needless to say, how you fight SPAM depends on how you perceive it. Below are examples of various types of SPAM.
In its conception, SPAM was simple, easily verifiable and low-scale. Basically, SPAM was an email message of a commercial nature written in plain text, with its sender easily traceable. This mail was manually created, sent individually by spammers using their email servers. But with the growth in technology, the amount of Internet traffic drastically increased, along with the ranks of Internet users. SPAM, expressed in its reach, scale, proficiency, resistance and adaptability, has risen to a menacing degree. Today, not only does SPAM simply annoy its recipients, it brings huge losses to the world economy, wastes the time of working people, and exhausts mail server resources on streams of superfluous data. For individuals, it hogs our bandwidth, takes up extra disk space, diverts our focus from business matters and brings infuriating content to our Inboxes. It is estimated that SPAM circulation tops 16 billion copies daily (this is roughly three SPAM messages a day for every human on Earth!). As one recently published report revealed, SPAM accounted for about two thirds of all e-mails received, and today it's hard to find a person whose online experience is not impacted by SPAM. The collective losses suffered from SPAM run in the tens of billions of dollars annually.
Adding insult to injury, spammers themselves enjoy hefty profits from their activities. According to the Business 2.0 magazine, for some spammers to bring in one million dollars a month, all that is required is a $20 purchase from one out of every 2,000 people who received the spammed emails-a mere 0.05% response rate. The economies of SPAM are hard to beat: for next to nothing, spammers can obtain lists of millions of harvested email addresses.
Read next:
Continue to Part II
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