Spam - 2nd Quarter 2005
Clearbuilt has been busy during the second quarter of 2005. We’ve launched a new site and a major upgrade to an existing site we maintain. See our website for the press releases.
We continue to add better equipment with more redundancy and remote monitoring capabilities at our hosting facility. For example, we not only monitor the temperature of our servers in several places inside each computer, but we monitor to the speed of each fan. This allows us to be proactive and stop problems from ever happening.
We are such an Internet-based company that a change of postal address is truly a non-event. However, please be aware that our postal mailing address has changed to:
Clearbuilt Technologies
5885 Cumming Highway #108-290
Sugar Hill, GA 30518
This quarter’s ClearPoint will focus on spam email. We’ve added several of our clients to our spam reduction service and this topic seems timely. Spam costs everybody in lost time to read emails, spam blocking software/hardware, dealing with spam complaints, filing legal charges against spammers and more. If you have any questions about spam or our spam reduction and virus protection service, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Have a great summer!
Neal
How Big Is Spam?
It is impossible to know exactly how much spam there is, but some figures say spam costs over $10 Billion to deal with every year. Front Bridge Technologies, Inc. notes in a June 1, 2005 press release that during the month of May over 7.2 billion messages were “transmitted across its network, blocking more than 85 percent as spam and rejecting more than 319 million virus-laden emails. Peak spam levels during the month exceeded 95 percent three times.”
Definitions
- Spam - an electronic communication that is not likely to be wanted or expected by a recipient
- Phishing - short for “Password Harvesting fISHING”, phishing is a form of spam that tries to trick users into giving up sensitive personal information. Expect to see lots of phishing emails associated with the recent CardSystems Solutions breach. The spams will perhaps “inform you” that you have one of the affected accounts and you need to complete a web form to start the process of protecting yourself. (NEVER provide personal information from an emailed request.)
- Zombies - A “zombie” is any computer connected to the Internet that has been infected by a virus that allows criminals to remotely control the computer without the owner’s knowledge and use it to, for example, send spam. This allows spammers to hide their identity.
Does spam work?
Yes.
The spammers are making money and that is why we will not see an end to spam in the near future.
Did you hear about the latest spamvertised invention?It’s a solar-powered flashlight.
How do spammers make money?
The process starts by collecting a list of email addresses. Here are some ways that is accomplished.
- data mining - searching websites and search engines for email addresses using automated tools
- domain information - search the whois database that lists each domain name registered and contact information, including email address, for each domain
- viruses - send out viruses that send back all the contact information from the infected person’s address list
- blanket emailing - start with a list of domain names, easily obtained from the whois database, and send emails to common email addresses such as bob@domain.com, sales@domain.com, info@domain.com, etc. If the email does not bounce back, then it is assumed to be a valid email.
- chat rooms - chat rooms are a great source of email addresses since people provide their email address and more when they sign up
Here is one scenario of how spam is created and money is made.
Hack Harvester uses one of the methods above to create a list of 300 thousand email addresses. Hack sells that list to Seedy Spammer for 1 penny each which puts $3,000 into his pocket. This money is tax free since Hack and Seedy are too good for tax laws.
Seedy then spams the list with the all too common “get a 3.25% loan for no money”. Let’s say that only .05% of the list responds to the spam with additional information about themselves and the loans that interests them. Seedy then sells that list to 6 main stream banks for $15 per email address. Given the money the bank can make off a loan, $15 for a “qualified” lead is a good deal.
* .05% response
* $15 per email
* 6 banks
- $3,000 for the list
= $10,500 profit
There are many other scenarios and each typically have more players involved, however, this illustrates that there is money to be made. One of the most notorious spammers is thought to have sent out over 30 million spams in a single day!
What do you call a spammer wearing a suit and tie?The Defendant.
How do we stop or control spam?
There is a simple way to stop spam. If everybody would quit responding to the offers in spam, then spam would go away. Unfortunately, that will not happen so here are some of the ways people and companies are trying to reduce spam.
Sending Method
You can try to stop email at the point of origin. The major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have implemented some methods that do help. However, this has diminishing returns. One such method that will not work and is frequently discussed is charging for sending emails. This would make the spam economics not work anymore, however, email has always been free and that is not likely to change.
Receiving Method
You can try to stop email at the point of receipt. You can implement spam firewalls and fancy filters. There are two main problems with these approaches. The first is the spammers quickly learn how to write their emails to pass the filters. The second is the filters can mark valid emails as being spam (known as a false-positive). You can employ blacklists filters (domains you won’t accept email from) and whitelists filters (you won’t accept email unless they are on your whitelist), but this can be very frustrating to businesses that rely on email for new business.
Legal Method
The third main effort of reducing spam is to take spammers to court. Many of the big ISPs are doing just that. It is an expensive and never ending process especially considering that many believe China is the worst spamming nation.
What does this mean for you?
The most popular approach for end users today is spam filtering. There are many advanced and easy to use options available that do their best to limit false-positives. A combination of spam filters is likely to produce a larger reduction.
These are not the only ways people are dealing with spam. There are other ideas that are being considered. However, until people stop responding to spam or the cost of sending spam becomes too great, we will continue to be fed a steady diet of spam. Bon Appétit!
Filed by nb on June 21st, 2005 under ClearPoint
