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’ve nailed the #1 rule in managing spam. Never let them know you’ve looked at the message.”
Lots of people still use old or badly configured software which will bring up embedded web graphics in their email. The spammer creates a URL to his graphics that is custom to the email address. This tells the spammer that his spam has been looked at.
Go here and learn:
http://freespamfilter.org
A free, open source email spam and antivirus solution. I followed one of the guides on that site and deployed it where I work. The results were amazing. After putting it in place almost NO spam gets through it. I'd say it blocks 99% of spam and nearly all virus laden messages. Even better, it's FREE!!
The Godfather as remade by Ed Wood, with Tor Johnson as Don Fanucci.
bump for later
“The NERVE of that e mail!
Sheesh.
Somebody needs to go back to basic grammar courses.”
Are you one of the drive-by grammar Nazis?
“Every declining empire needs its bread and circuses.”
For some reason that’s quite funny this morning!
Blocking spam at the client level is relatively easy by being disciplined with how you deal with received messages, and by being discrete with how you share your address online. And yes, there are plenty of free tools that will help you manage what you do receive.
The real problem I see it is the load that the relentless onslaught of spam is placing on the infrastructure of the Internet. Add the billions of messages bouncing around to the advent of bandwidth hogs like Youtube, the network tv sites, etc and you have a system that is growing in requirements at an exponential pace.
The fact that the Internet stands up to the demands placed on it, without much more than very scattered regional outages and congestion issues, has to be the #1 technological marvel today.
Given that the technology to exploit and potentially bring the whole thing down is running in the shadows via botnets and the ability to run coordinated attacks, makes for the uneasy truce. Truthfully, when you get excited that projects like the Folding@Home project involving Playstation 3’s are harnessing unused computing cycles for good, you need to realize that the concept has been in play for many additional years by the bad guys.
I really do feel that at some point a WMD attack on the US economy will be perpetrated using home computers, media centers and console gaming systems. Feed a bit of malicious instruction into them and let it sleep until you’re ready to unleash all manner of havoc on an increasingly Internet-dependent economy.
Not to dismiss border security outright, or to sound Luddite, but the real danger to the US is through turncoat technology. Imagine the danger that sheer traffic poses to all of us. Get all the machines talking at once and the Internet crashes. Doesn’t matter what they’re saying or who they’re talking to. Just get ‘em shouting and it all comes down. Doesn’t matter if you’re blocking it at your door, because the pipe will eventually get so clogged that all traffic will stop.
See where I’m headed? The expertise and equipment to handle this type of attack won’t show up under UN inspection, it doesn’t cost but a tiny fraction compared to traditional WMD programs, and it doesn’t need to move to within physical proximity of the intended target.
Unplug the Internet and we’ll all “bombed back to the stone ages.”
So very true. I'm a little surprised that the network wide doomsday scenario you laid out hasn't happened yet. Apparently the terrorists aren't yet into creating 'botnets'. As soon as they learn to use them as the spammers have, then God help us. As you said, all it takes is the placement of dormant code to lie in wait for the 'go command' from the source. No one really knows how large a botnet has gotten. Some have been found to number in the thousands of 'infected' host computers. As a matter of fact, most of the mail we block originates from 'owned' windows machines, coming from what are obviously residential broadband hostnames. If someone is very patient, as the terrorists are known to be, they could grow and expand a massive botnet over a long period of time. From what I understand, it doesn't even require a great deal of knowledge to get a botnet up and running.
Interesting info Here
People who use email for business open email from unknown senders all the time. It's not at all the same as a ticking box with no return address, it has an address, and it may be a potential customer.
Not so fast, tell me more?
Interesting.
I check my email once or twice a week and there’s rarely any unwanted spam email. I guess this computer must have a spam filtering.... thingie, whatever.
LOL!
get gmail...
i get almost 0% spam in my inbox.
I hear from Lashay Guillermina every once in a while. I'll let you know when I do.
For years, preview panes in mail readers “opened” spam anytime you hightlighted an email for deletion.
I’ve never used the preview pane view for the inbox in Outlook because I heard the same thing... I do have it set that way for my sent and read mail folders, though.
Spam filters block a large percentage of legitimate mail. Obviously the system does not work.
The solution must start with payment of a small fee to send email. Perhaps 10 emails for 1 cent. The ability to trace each email to a credit card or checking account would stop most of the junk.
Also, there must be elimination of the email client programs which allow the sender to use anything at all as the sender address.
“Email postage” is a wonderful way to get government involved with a system that is working too smoothly.
Here in Milwaukee - the local government is getting involved with taxing internet television, making the provider pay for access to the market, a la the Time Warner television deal, for access to infrastructure.
TWT is sour because their cable monopoly stranglehold may be slipping as technologies advance and their old model and long-term anti-competition deals are backfiring in their faces.
A bit of a tangent bringing this up, but a wonderful example of why added regulation and billing complexity is almost always a bad idea.
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