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Junk e-mail. Spam causes problems for
most internet users, whose mailboxes and favourite newsgroups fill up
daily with advertisements for get-rich-quick schemes, cosmetic surgery
procedures and pornographic websites. The senders of spam, who are called
spammers, collect e-mail addresses from newsgroups, e-mail directories and
third party vendors to which they then send unsolicited messages.
The
spam problem is growing incredibly fast, as spammers discover better ways of
finding e-mail address and new ways of covering their tracks. A study in the
United States by Ferris Research estimated that unsolicited email cost US
companies nearly $9 billion in 2002 as a result of productivity losses,
heave technical support requirements and bandwidth consumption. In
the UK, spam accounted for 40% of all e-mail sent in December 2002,
according to one survey, an increase of more than 30% in a single year. One
reason for this sudden rise is the advent of the "dictionary harvest" attack
against businesses, in which a spammer sends tens of thousands of common
names to a corporate e-mail system. He then collects the names of those that
are received normally rather than returned, indicating that they are live
addresses.
Large isps have been hit particularly hard by spammers. In February
2003, aol reported that its anti-spam technology was blocking 780m pieces of
junk mail every day , an average of 22pieces per member. In December 2002,
the company was awarded $7m damages against a company that sent its members
nearly 1 billion unsolicited e-mail advertising adult websites.
Unfortunately for e-mail users, the regulation of spam has proved to be as
difficult as any other kind of regulation of the internet. Because offenders
can change their identities so fast online, they can usually stay one step
ahead of the antispam police, almost always private companies rather than
governments, which have been slow to pass legislation restricting the
distribution of unwanted e-mail. But new filtering techniques, combined with
frequent updates to directories of known spammers, are helping business and
isps to counter the problem. One threat comes from a new generation of
bot
programs that automatically create fake free-mail accounts from which
to send their spam, and researchers are busily developing defences based on
Turing tests to distinguish between bots and real human beings.
How
spam came to be used in this context is obscure. Many people agree that it
derives from a sketch by Monty Python, a group of British comedians, which
features a large number of occurrences of the word "spam" in the script, the
credits and a song inspired by a type of luncheon meat called spam that has
been on sale since 1937. The more literally minded have suggested that it
stands for Self-propelled Advertising Material. |
