Posted on 05/10/2007 3:46:00 AM PDT by Clive
Up to 75% of all electronic mail is "spam" -- unsolicited junk messages sent out in bulk by scam artists. Given this deluge, it is the rare that any one spam message catches our attention, even for a moment. But spammers are a determined, occasionally creative lot. They would burn down an entire forest to roast a hot dog.
One particular bit of spam I just received seemed to merit more scrutiny than most. Addressed to a rarelyused corporate e-mail account, and received by no one else at the same firm, the e-mail seemed to originate on a Yahoo! account somewhere in the United Kingdom. It also read rather like a death threat.
"Some one that I will not like to tell you the name came to me and told me that he want you and the whole of your family dead and he provide us with your name, Address and Phone Number and with my network I sent my boys to track you down and they have done that," read the message.
"As I am writing to you now my men are monitoring you and there telling me every thing about you. So I will like to know if you Like to live or die as some one has paid for you to die. I am given you just two days to get back to me or I will just make a call and tell my boys to wipe you and your family out."
It was Monday morning, earlier this week. I read the e-mail, and then re-read it. Aside from the threat, it certainly bore all the hallmarks of one of those charming Nigerian Internet spam scams: fake e-mail account, bad grammar. But instead of inveigling an investment in some offshore venture, using flattery and guile, this e-mail took a comparatively direct approach: It was threatening to kill my family and, apparently, me. Hmmm.
I posted the e-mail on my Weblog, and asked if others had also received it. Within hours, dozens of people responded. Some urged me to contact the police; others suggested it was garden-variety spam and should therefore be ignored; some, like the rebarbative blog "Small Dead Animals" -- where a regular correspondent had earlier suggested that members of my family be sexually assaulted-- thought it was hugely funny.
I didn't take it all that seriously, to be honest. It was obviously a spam scheme. Who could possibly get hurt?
Then, two established Canadian bloggers --Steve Janke and "Bene Diction" -- wrote that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been investigating similar threats in the United States. The "spammers," as the FBI put it in their press release, were "preying not on recipients' greed or good intentions, but on their fears." More than 100 complaints about the extortion email had been received by the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center in the first few weeks of 2007 alone.
According to the FBI, when a target angrily responds to the e-mail, the spammers know they have located a live account. They then respond with some unique information that serves to identify the recipient -- a child's name, a street lived on -- and the target perhaps becomes frightened. The extortion scheme then starts to yield dividends.
Spam, historically, is mainly just irritating. Whether initiated by a corporation to promote a product -- oftentimes, drugs, pornography or unwanted financial services -- or whether originating in an Internet cafe in the developing world, the stuff is truly a blight of our modern digital age. From a few hundred unwanted e-mails sent in 1978, to more than an estimated 90 billion sent every day in 2007, spam affects every one of us with an e-mail account. Microsoft's Bill Gates receives millions of spam messages yearly. Spam's economic cost is in the untold billions.
As most of us have discovered, antispam techniques are only partially effective; if one's countermeasures get too aggressive, they often end up filtering out legitimate e-mails. (Lesson: never use the word "Viagra" in any email you want to see delivered.)
What should be done? In Canada, we need to finally follow the lead of U.S. legislators -- who required in 2003 that spam senders observe certain basic rules: a subject line that tells the truth; no deceptive information in the identifying e-mail "headers" and a conspicuous display of the sender's postal address. Failure to meet these basic requirements renders the spam illegal. Such measures won't end spam --especially the offshore variety. But it will at least up the stakes for offenders by making them criminals.
In 2004, we had an Industry Canada spam task force that went nowhere. A report was written in 2005 that called on the federal government to engage ubiquitous "stakeholders" and to "continue to pursue a multifaceted strategy for stopping spam." A few anti-spam private member's bills have withered away; the Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, recently raised the issue in a speech. But real legislative action to target spam? Nothing.
As the uneasy recipient of a death threat against my family -- spam as it was -- I pledge my vote to the Member of Parliament who stamps out the scourge of spam once and for all. I suspect I'm not alone on this one.
- Warren Kinsella blogs for the Post and at www.warrenkinsella.com.
You actually open email from unknown people/accounts?
If I snail mailed you a box with no return address on it, and it smelled funny and was making a mysterious ticking sound, would you open it?
Just wunderin...
I am actually in the business of defending against these idiots, not doing it myself.
I don't know if I would simply report an email like that to the FBI, or if I would respond first with "molon labe", then report it.
Instead of having the mail program fetch and do all stages of filtering, I use fetchmail to fetch the mail and pass it on to procmail which invokes spamassassin to assign a spam probability value to each message. Fetchmail runs as a daemon once every six minutes.
All mail assessed by spanassassin at a spam value of 5 or more is considered spam. I had written procmail to send any mail with a spam value of 15 or more to file /dev/null (for non linux users /de/null is the linux black hole)
I have been reducing the black hole threshold in stages as my confidence in spanassassin's assessments increase. It is now down to 10, which leaves a small fraction of spam to be occasionally scanned and deleted.
When I open my mail program (I use KMail, my son uses Thunderbird) the filtered mail is already in my system mailbox and already filtered for spam. The mail programs simply do secondary filtering to move anything between 5 and 15 to a spam folder and assign the non-spam to various folders based on source and topic.
My ISP has a very good spam filter but it involves my going into the server with a browser occasionally to clean out the Junk folder. Also, it does not assign weight to spam so all spam has to be scanned for false positives, not just the low value spam that did not automatically get sent by my filtering to /dev/null.
Spamassassin uses a naive Bayesian statistical analysis, it teaches itself every time I catch a message that it has assessed incorrectly and pas the incorrectly assessed message back to it, so its accuracy improves over time, eventually approaching certainty.
I do not.
The author of this article is a journalist. His job requires him to open all mail from strangers that are not obvious bulk mail.
He or his system administrator should have installed a spam filter to get rid of the more obvious spam but there will still be a residue that he will want to look at himself.
Make the sending of a death threat via the Internet a capital offense, and those scary emails will disappear.
Of course Canada would have to rethink their view of the death penalty.
There is nothing inherently wrong with people getting killed, as long as the RIGHT people are getting killed.
For an experienced internet guru, it's not that hard.
There are unscrupulous companies out there that will do a backround check for $50. If you can get a couple thousand out of one person, you just paid for a bunch more.
Handcuff them to telemarketers and throw them in the ocean.
Yea, you can defintely tell that most spammers are not English due to their mangling of the language.
gmail on a mac
no spam, no virus concerns
“Handcuff them to telemarketers and throw them in the ocean.”
That’s a start. We ought to include lawyers in that group too.
I never give out my main ISP email address and when I shop online, I use internet based email, so all the spam goes there and not to my main address. I have been doing this for years now.
Main ISP email: Zero spam, Yahoo email: A Cyber-Landfill of Spam.
5 years ago I had trouble installing my ISP provided email and started using web based email instead while I got the problem sorted out. After thinking about the hassles acquaintances were having with email viruses, I decided to stay with internet email. That , SpyBot and AVG, have combined to allow me an internet experience little troubled by popups, spam, and virii.
Law enforcement would be able to trace extortion payments, even international wires or cash in the mail.
It’s easy to scare someone but unless you corner them with a wad of cash, your chance of getting payment are slim without a huge risk of law enforcement watching your every move.
If you are in a country such as North Korea where the government will not cooperate with US law enforcement, then the threat is less risky because the extortionist would have to put up alot of resources to follow through on the threat.
But this article makes a good subtle point. Never respond to such emails.
You’ve nailed the #1 rule in managing spam. Never let them know you’ve looked at the message. Don’t reply and certainly don’t “click here to unsubscribe” if you think the offer is completely out of the blue and absolute garbage.
Could be the the email’s real goal is to identify active inboxes and active readers. Once you’re established as a “live one” you can expect your spam volume to instensify expoentially as they probe for the right offer to get you to bite.
Evidently they know me pretty well because I do have a small penis, I can't sexually please any of the women in my life and I'm thinking about refinancing my house.
I think all FReepers knew that. By the way...I'm selling Carbon Offsets at 1/2 discount. Limited time only. No checks. If you are interested please FReepmail me your account number and pin.
My company sells “asshole offsets”.
You can pay my company to take kids to the zoo or rescue puppys so you can cut people off in traffic or cheat on your wife without feeling any guilt.
LOL! You’re killing me!!!
ROTFLMAO!
I deleted my Viagra offers, or else I’d forward them to you...but I received this today....
Your e-mail address attached to
ticket number 77007742781005-18721 with reference number 414-3721060 drew winning numbers 7-00-71-00-66-49 and credited to batch number 121cfc, which consequently won in the 1st category via our electronic ticket as stated above.
You have therefore been approved for a pay out of
1,800,000.00 (One Million Eight Hundred Thousand Pounds).
For verification please fill the form below and forward it to our fiduciary agent the person of : Simon Lee
Email: leesimonuk2@yahoo.com.hk
Sheesh.
Somebody needs to go back to basic grammar courses.
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