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Webwatch
January 2004
Spam
The now famous Monty Python's Spam sketch set in a Café had
the waitress saying:- "Well, there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage,
and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon, and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and
spam; spam, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and
spam; spam, spam, spam, egg, and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,
baked beans, spam, spam, spam, and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes
with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg
on top and spam."
It is perhaps unsurprising that anything unwanted and supplied in bulk has become known as spam. The current deluge of spam emails has served to ensure that the word spam has a firm entry in any dictionary of quality.
Most spam email comes from the USA and China but South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Taiwan, Russia, Italy and the United Kingdom come in the top ten. It may surprise you to know that your machine may be helping them, that it is actually sending the stuff!
Spammers use large powerful networks to feed millions of spams every day but several anti-spam organisations have ganged up to slow them down. The spammers reacted in several ways, one was to mount a Denial of Service attack on the anti-spam computers, the other was to enlist spam victim's machines as unwitting spammers.
The first reaction, the Denial of Service attack, is achieved by arranging that a huge number of messages of various types is sent to a specific address in a very short time. The recipient machine is then overwhelmed, so much so that normal traffic cannot get through. It is rather like the co-ordinated slow bike rides designed to block streets during a political demonstration. The second reaction is achieved by placing computer code on millions of machines that then sends spam emails to all the addresses in the victim's address book. The result is an enormous deluge of spam. This is what happened in early 2003 with the SoBig virus and caused the internet to slow down so much. It didn't stop, it became the M25 in the rush hour.
Both of these reactions can be achieved via malicious computer code. Whilst computer people will differentiate between various types of malicious code such as viruses, trojans, worms etc, for the sake of simplicity, I shall refer to all of them here as viruses. If the victim's machine is not protected, older viruses install themselves on the machine and do some damage, giving the writer a vicarious thrill of some kind. More modern viruses do not always seek to damage the infected machine, instead they get it to act as a sender of spam or other unwanted material. Often the only indication that anything is amiss is the slowing down of the machine, the occasional crash and odd emails from friends. Up to 60% of all spam is now sent using virus-infected computers, one of them may be yours!
What you can do about it
1. NEVER reply to a spam, NEVER click any link on a spam, especially
those that offer to "opt-out" or to stop receiving these emails.
All this does is to provide the spammers with three kinds of information,
that yours is a live address, that you read spam and that your Internet
Service Provider (ISP) does not filter the spam for you. This tells them
you are the perfect spam victim.
2. Ignore any email that looks odd, even ones that seem to come from "real" addresses. For someone with even a rudimentary knowledge of email, it is simple to "spoof" an address, to make an email appear to come from any address they like. Seeing any address in the "from" field means nothing at all. I even get ones that say they come from me!
3. Ignore any message that tells you to pay anything unless you are expecting that bill. Spammers are clever, they will use all sorts of ruses to make you pay up, including threats or offers to send child pornography etc.
4. Never respond to an email that offers to remove you from an email list. These are all operated by spammers and work like point 1 above. There are NO "remove from spam list" services that work. If you send money to these people, they get richer, you get more spam.
5. Use anti-spam software such as Mailwasher from www.firetrust.com. You can try it free, registering costs about £21 and it is worth it. It works by looking at your email before your email software sees it. It then uses a list of friends email addresses to let through good email and a sophisticated system of rules that help decide if an email is spam or not. You then get an opportunity to read it or delete it. When this is done, you start your usual email software and the spam will not be there.
6. Make sure you have modern and regularly updated anti-virus software AND you have completed the Windows updates. Anti-virus software will often detect or get rid of an infection but the Windows updates will prevent many of them in the first place. The SoBig virus is useless against upgraded Windows installations, it only became a huge problem because so many people did not bother. It is still a problem, caused by these same people.
7. Write to your MP and complain that the recent legislation concerning spam is utterly useless. On the day it came into force, I noticed spam increased by at least 20% and has not diminished. Although in the so-called "free" USA, it is now quite legal to spam people, here in Europe we can lead the way and make a difference. Do not forget, if Parliament really wants to, this problem can be fixed.
You may like to look at a British anti-spam website, www.spamhaus.org.
Happy surfing
Howard