'Two years from now, spam will be solved,' Microsoft's Bill Gates told the
World Economic Forum, launching a new technology to identify senders of e-mail.
Sender ID allows people to distinguish themselves from criminals offering
fake Viagra, dodgy stock tips or phishing for banking passwords and promised
to clean our in-boxes of spam for good.
Unfortunately, that was three years ago and, instead of being saved, spam
has exploded from an occasional nuisance to an online plague that some experts
think may kill off e-mail for good. Spam now accounts for around 90 per cent
of all e-mail sent worldwide, with spammers increasing at around one per
cent a month. Laurie Yecies, vice president of ZoneAlarm, says: 'Spam has
evolved beyond a marketing technique, becoming a much larger and more lucrative
mechanism for potentially harming consumers. So what went wrong?
'The underlying issue is compromised - or zombie - computers,' says Dave
Rand, chief technical officer of security software specialists Trend Micro.
'Zombie computers today send more than 90 per cent of the spam on the Internet.'
Zombie PCs have been infected by a virus (ironically, usually contracted
from an e-mail attachment) and are sending out reams of spam without their
owners' knowledge. 'Because the spammers have so much raw computing power
from compromised computers,' says Rand, 'they can make every message essentially
unique, with no common elements to filter for.'
Zombie Computers
Trend Micro estimates that the number of zombie computers in Europe has
quadrupled over the past year to 7million PCs propelling Bntain into the
top four spamming countries worldwide. It lays the blame squarely at the
doors of Internet service providers (ISPs). 'ISPs need to take a more active
stance in protecting their customers;' says Rand, 'They should tell customers
when their computers are exhibiting signs of being compromised. Most ISPs
today choose to ignore the problem.'
Or even worse. Anti-spam campaigners Spamhaus claim that, while many ISPs
simply decide that to close the loopholes that spammers exploit would be
too costly, a small number knowingly sell services to professional spammers
for profit. Dealing with all this spam isn't just annoying, it costs money
- an average of about £350 per person annually according to Nucleus
Research.
And there's an environmental price, too. The world's data centres currently
consume around 1.2 per cent of all electricity generated globally - a figure
that's set to nearly double by 2010. And, as if an army of zombie computers,
unethical ISPs and carbon-spewing servers weren' t enough to contend with,
a brand new threat is emerging: image spam. This uses randomiy generated
images containing junk messages, making them harder for anti-spam software
to analyse and identify. Each image-spam e-mail is also much larger than
a text spam, consuming about three times as much Internet bandwidth, slowing
down the whole Web even more. As recently as late 2005, image spam accounted
for just one per cent of all spam It's now at 20 per cent and climbing
fast.
Sender Defender
Of course as quickly as spammers innovate, anti spam companies fight back.
Microsoft's Sender ID system - and a similar system called DKIM -are starting
to tackle spammers, and help to reduce false' positives (genuine e-mails
mistakenly labelled as spam). But the silver bullet that Bill Gates promised
us in 2004 seems as far away as ever, considering the ammunition that spammers
have in reserve. Rand warns: 'The spammers today can easily send at least
ten times more spam messages than they currently do. At some point, unless
we do something, people will give up e-mail as a medium. Perhaps that will
be at 99 per cent [spam to all mail], or 99.9 per cent. But it will
happen.'
Edited by FIONA MACDONALD atmetro@ukmetre.co.uk |
Spammers aim at the heart strings
SPAM is hitting single men where it hurts. The latest generation
of spam messages are tugging on lonely men's heart strings by pretending
to be beautiful girls in search of love. Spammers are using the boom in social
networking websites such as MySpace
and Bebo to pretend to know ahout their
victims. E-mails supposedly from attractive young women begin by saying they
have seen details about the victim on the web. The hope is the men will then
build a 'relationship' with the 'woman' and eventually reveal their bank
details or transfer money to them for a plane ticket. IT security firm Sophos
said: 'People need to ask themselves whether it is really likely that an
unkown beautiful woman would see them on the web.' It's payback time for the email scams BY DANIEL BATES
FED UP of scams with barely believable tales of 'undervalued'
Nigerian stocks or sick relatives in need of cash clogging up your inbox?
Well now there's a new website that gives you the chance to beat scammers
at their own game by conning them into thinking you've fallen for their tricks.
Scambaits.com gives people tips on
how to protect themselves as they pose as gullible fools. It then provides
a message board so 'baiters' can exchange stories of how they strung the
fraudsters along. Among the funniest examples are pictures that baiters have
convinced scammers to send to prove how authentic their claims are. One shows
a man standing against a wall with '100 per cent risk free' on a sign in
front of him. There are pictures of fake cheques sent by scammers, forms
from their 'church' to show their holy credentials and even faked newspaper
articles to show their personal tragedies. The site also contains recordings
of phone calls to scammers which people can listen to. It was set up in Canada
by a group of unidentified men who have been baiting scammers for some time
and wanted to share their knowledge. The site says: 'So the fight is on!
Baiters versus Scammers - Scambaiting at its finest. Remember, these guys
are criminals. They don't give a hoot about you or your families - or how
badly they leave you financially and otherwise. 'So don't give them the chance
to be able to trace you.'
One in 12 e-mails now infected with PC virus BY OLIVER STALLWOOD
|
Britain is among worst spammers BY MILES ERWIN
BRITAIN is in the 'dirty dozen' of countries which send out
the most spam over the Internet. Top of the list is the US which relays nearly
three in ten (28.4 per cent) of all junk messages, while Britain lies tenth
with 2.4 per cent. The figures relate to the number of hijacked computers
that are sending out spam, not spammers. |
See Also Sending Email,Attached Files,Data Security,The Prying Game,Change the Way you Email,Sending and Using Email
Don't open e-mail attachments from anyone you don't know -
or if it looks at all suspicious. Do you really need another picture of a
cute polar bear anyway?
ONE in 12 e-mails is now infected with a computer virus, a new report
shows. The figure is more than 17 times higher than last year, when it stood
at just one in every 208 messages. In 2002 it was just one in 392, an Internet
security company said yesterday. The most prolific virus this year has been
Mydoom, which appeared in several different forms. There has also been a
leap in the number of spam messages being sent. In the first half of this
year, 63.5 per cent of messages were spam. Last year, it was 37.9 per cent,
and just 1.5 per cent in 2002, the study by MessageLabs found. Another worrying
trend is the rise in phishing, online scams to trick people into
disclosing their personal details. The con often starts with an e-mail purporting
to come from the recipient's bark. It frequently asks the Net user to visit
a bogus website, where they are duped into revealing financial details. In
August last year, MessageLabs intercepted just 14 phishing e-mails; this
year an average of 250,000 a month have been detected, with a peak in January
of 337,000. 'The boundaries between viruses and spam have been eroded, and
commercial gain would seem to be the driving force,' said Paul Wood, of
MessageLabs. 'There is little or no profit to be gained from simply distributing
viruses but, when you consider the income that can be earned from spam, you
have an altogether more attractive proposition.' He blamed
'