New e-mail threat: Spam beefs up
May 19, 2008 by Valerie HelmbreckPosted in: Budgets and spending, Information security, Software, Special Report
Your inbox is full of it, your servers are clogged by it and, like mosquitoes and gray hair, everybody hates it.
Spam.
Those annoying, useless e-mail messages about enlarging body parts or not-to-be missed stock opportunities seem to breed in your in-box. They multiply faster than bunnies and no one seems to know how the folks who send it got their e-mail address in the first place.
Webopedia, the online tech research site, defines spam as:
“Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it’s unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.
“In addition to wasting people’s time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers.
“There is some debate about the source of the term, but the generally accepted version is that it comes from the Monty Python song, “Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam…” Like the song, spam is an endless repetition of worthless text. Another school of thought maintains that it comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunch “meat” Spam:
- Nobody wants it or ever asks for it.
- No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree.
- Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people.”
So why should finance be worried about spam? Because the new generation of spammers aren’t just trying to sell you herbal remedies and shares of obscure mining companies in Mozambique. There’s plenty of spam out there carrying viruses, Trojans and attempting to recruit you and your employees to be part of the notorious world of “botnets” — a web of computers that unknowingly send out spam.
Spam also eats up valuable server space and bandwidth that could be used for more productive uses.
Your IT group is probably using spam filtering software to try and manage to influx of all this junk, but spammers are very sophisticated about evading these traps. It’s likely your techies will want to upgrade anti-spam software regularly so they can stay one step ahead.
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May 20th, 2008 at 11:24 am
The comments about spam the meat are lies and unfounded. I have contacted Hormel regarding the issue.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Hormel lost their appeal regarding the trademark of “spam” to SpamArrest and several other companies including my own.
When you do contact them be sure to ask how many illegal aliens their factories are employing (illegally).
regards,
Tom Caldwell
Idalis Software
May 21st, 2008 at 10:17 am
I work for a small non-profit, so we have no IT department…. How, exactly, does one keep these people off our server? Someone hijacks our e-mail addresses to send out their spam (their “undeliverable” messages end up in our in-boxes). How do you stop that? Anti-virus software doesn’t seem to be helpful, unless they try to send a virus through the server…. The article would have been more useful if it included some hints or tips about this. Just telling me it’s called spam isn’t helpful!
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 am
Margaret,
Well, there are several technologies which were implemented (SPF record checking, DomainKeys DKIM, and SenderID, do a web search for them please) These were intended to help prevent message bouncing as they would test to see if the address was actually sent from your mail server, but the people on the other end don’t always check for these characteristics. Given that technologists and IT managers will NEVER EVER agree on a standard, (nor could one be instantly implemented or forced) it’s pretty pointless. They can “help” in some cases, but only if the bouncers on the other end are running them, which they are not, obviously. This doesn’t solve the spam problem as a whole as bouncing will continue to occur from legitimate sources and not everyone can implement a solution that won’t work for all internet e-mail (see below). It’s up to them to turn bouncing off.
People might need to send mail from your domain on another outbound e-mail server, hence checking to see that your spoofed e-mails actually came from your server could never be implemented internet wide because they will have came from another server and so forth. The aforementioned technologies will only work for 90% of internet e-mail.
You’ll probably notice that many bounced spam e-mail servers also attach the original spam message, which is completely pointless to you since you didn’t send it. E-mail message rejection for any other notice than a full mailbox is quite pointless as well. Technology is only as good as the creator of it, and even then it’s still never going to be perfect. The only true way to prevent this would be to implement a better anti-spam solution but there are hundreds to choose from and most potential clients I speak to are using one, two and sometimes as many as three spam/virus filters (and still having problem because spam and viruses are increasing). A combined “stack” of anti-spam and anti-virus solutions are the only viable options at this point.
For a small non-profit, I usually direct them to a third party e-mail hosting company, which alleviates the burden of a small business hosting email (costs) and IT management costs (support). I recommend http://www.mailtrust.com. Many third party hosting companies have “good” spam and virus filtering but it will never be perfect and you DO GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR! The only solution to the spam and virus problem is at its source, or where it’s originating from but that’s another topic altogether. That’s our focus, but we integrate with the providers of e-mail solutions and not so much the end users or clients themselves, other than to prevent infected computers from sending malicious e-mail from your network, also known as “spam zombies”.
Hope you found the information helpful.
Regards,
Tom Caldwell
Idalis Software
August 16th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Great information, I will be linking back to you and going to look around at your other posts.
August 22nd, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Hi, what inspires you to post articles about this topic? It is very informative and enriches my knowledge!
August 25th, 2009 at 3:14 am
Great! It is really an interesting concept!
September 21st, 2009 at 7:47 pm
No cards are easy to get approved for anymore. Consumer credit lines have now been cut by over $2.5 Trillion (last week’s figures, thru end-July). Credit lines are being reduced or eliminated entirely. New credit is not being extended unless you have excellent credit.
If you can get a new credit card application approved, the amount of the credit limit will depend on your income and amount of credit currently available to you.