Until now, antispam developers and their products have played defense only. But now, one activist wants spam filters to automatically launch attacks against suspected spammers’ sites to shut them down.

Fearing that spammers are increasingly finding ways to slip their unwanted messages past the current generation of filtering technologies, activists are taking a second look at a proposal to use denial-of-service attacks in the fight against spam.

Such attacks, which are illegal and can disrupt a company’s communications network by burying its servers in unnecessary requests, have traditionally been associated with pranksters who use viruses to distribute their attack software on thousands of computers.

Under the proposal, which was initially published in August by antispam activist Paul Graham, the attacks would be launched automatically by the next generation of spam filters. The attacks would be initiated whenever the filters received a new piece of spam containing a Web link. Read the rest of this entry »

If the maturity of a Web technology can be measured by the amount of attention spammers pay to it, then blogging has definitely come of age.

After a wave of aggressive spam attacks this month, bloggers suddenly found themselves scrambling for antispam weaponry and confronting the questions that have bedeviled e-mail and Usenet for years. How much openness can blogs afford? What freedoms are bloggers willing to trade to keep spammers out?

The problem of blog spam is not entirely new. Last year “referral marketers” began inserting their clients’ URLs into bloggers’ referral logs. Around the same time, bloggers began reporting spam occasionally popping up in the public comments on their sites.

Until recently, however, comment spam posed little more than an occasional nuisance. But after blogger Jay Allen saw spammers hit 120 of his posts over the course of four days, he knew the problem had reached a new level of urgency.

“I realized that day that we were facing a new predator in the jungle, and if we didn’t adapt ? and quickly ? it would be having us for dinner,” he said.

The latest wave of spam attacks focused on

Six Apart’s popular
Movable Type publishing system, whose built-in comments do not require registration and allow bloggers to block comments only by IP address ? a restriction spammers can easily avoid. “Movable Type’s comment system is extremely open, which is incredible for a community tool, but unfortunately also highly susceptible to abuse,” Allen said. Read the rest of this entry »

Spam. We’re reading about it everywhere now and we’re not talking potted meat. It’s the kind that clogs up your email box every day trying to sell you everything including the moon.
Well I have a special treat for you. An interview with the “spam king”.
Of course, that’s not his real name. He’s afraid to divulge that for obvious reasons. This person started using spam as a marketing method in the late 90’s sending out 100’s of thousands of emails a day and he kindly offered to tell us about how he does his dirty deeds.

Wade ? Thanks for joining us today. What got you into the spam marketing industry?

SK ? Money, pure and simple. Of course more people willing to spend money on the Internet really got things going. It wasn’t until about 2 years ago that mass email blasting got effective although I’ve been spamming for years.

Wade ? How many people do you send email too?

SK ? Oh, I’ve cut back a bit but anywhere between 300,000 to 800,000 a day. I’m a small time operator. The big time guys are sending out 10 times that number every day. Read the rest of this entry »

Posting an email address in a public place is not an invitation for companies to send unsolicited advertisements. Hosting a public Web forum or Usenet server does not give companies permission or the moral right to advertise on it. And soliciting comments from the public on a weblog entry or other Web page does not mean that companies or individuals are invited to use it for their advertising purposes.

Usenet news succumbed to spam long ago. Email was next. Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you cannot win.

We have complained amongst ourselves, tried technological solutions, and tried to understand the nature of comment spam. And we are done. We now intend to fight back. Read the rest of this entry »

Spam folder in the mail client Mail:

E-mail

The largest flow of spam is distributed via electronic mail (e-mail). Currently, the proportion of viruses and spam in general traffic, e-mail is on an estimated 70 to 95 percent . As spam is most frequent advertising unpopular products: rolex, viagra, etc. .

Spammers collect e-mail addresses by using a special robot, or manually (rarely), using a web page, conference Usenet, mailing lists, electronic bulletin boards, guest books, chat rooms … This robot software is able to collect thousands of addresses per hour and create one database for further distribution by them as spam. Some companies only deal with the collection of addresses, a database and then sell. Some companies sell spammers e-mail addresses of their customers, they have ordered goods or services via e-mail. There is another way to get a long list of e-mail addresses: the addresses are generated by first randomly on specified patterns (from thousands to a million), and then just checked the special program-validator on their validity (existence). Read the rest of this entry »

Communication over the network with advertisements (advertised address removed)

Sometimes spam distribution network via the built-in Microsoft Windows SMB-service Messenger. These messages appear as pop-ups (unless a third-party software, manufacturing them in other ways). In this case, to turn off their admission may be, for example, to stop the Messenger service using net stop messenger [12]. In versions of Windows NT, beginning with Windows XP SP2, this service has already stopped by default, so this method of distribution are less likely to occur.

SMS-messages

Spam can be spread not only through the Internet. Advertising messages sent to mobile phones via SMS-messages, especially the unpleasant fact that they are difficult to defend.

Collect email addresses

Spammers find out the email addresses of users in different ways. Some of them are:
Address mailbox user posted on the public site ? mostly in the guest book, forum, personal card, etc., where it can find a special program (harvester), Scanning indexing sites such as search engine robots.
If the address of the mailbox is not unique word, for example, common name, it may be chosen for the dictionary. Do spammers have special dictionaries that include common words, names of people, place names and some of the most popular combination of network slang. Combining this dictionary and a list of domain names (open public), a spammer gets a list of addresses for mailing.
If you are a person with whom the owner of this correspondence box was infected with a Trojan program, all the addresses from its address book can get to a spammer.
The database of customers a company could be stolen or even sold by the company spammers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ideology

It is clear that spam brings economic benefits to its customers. This means that users, despite the dislike of spam, does enjoy the services advertised through spam. Until the impact of spam exceeds the cost of overcoming protection, spam will not disappear. Thus, the surest way to fight a denial of service advertised through spam. There are proposals on the use of public condemnation, until the end of communication, against those who buy spam advertised goods and services.

Other methods are aimed at inhibiting the spammers access to users.

Preventive measures to protect

The surest way to fight spam ? do not let spammers get e-mail address. This is a difficult task, but some precautions can be taken.
Do not publish your email address on public websites.
If for some reason the email account to publish, it can be coded like ?u_s_e_r_ (a) _d_o_m_a_i_n_._n_e_t?. Spammers use special programs to scan websites and collect email addresses, so even a masking addresses can help. It should be remembered, however, that in the simplest cases ?encoded? will be able to recognize and address of the program. In addition, it is an inconvenience not only for spammers, but also for ordinary users. Read the rest of this entry »