Do You Know About Spam Mail Awareness | Antivirus

             Awareness of the Costs and Consequences of Spam

A brief history of the development of spam

Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was developed in the United States from 1967 (...)4Spam is older than the Internet: Already in the era of telegraphy in the 19th century, the Western Union in the United States had authorized the sending of unsolicited telegraph messages to several recipients over its network. The first spam was sent in 1978 by Gray Thuerk; it was a chain message sent to six hundred users of the Arpanet 1 network. In 1994, the first unsolicited commercial email was launched by two lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel; the message was aimed at immigrants wishing to live in the United States, it brought in 100,000 dollars to the lawyers.

The characteristics of spam

The different forms of spam

Two forms of spam are now identified [Armstrong and Black, 2007]. Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) is sent for direct marketing purposes. While most professionals refute the term spam, which is very pejorative and above all linked to an illegal practice, they nevertheless admit practising massively targeted email marketing campaigns.

 Charter defining the rules of conduct and politeness to be adopted on the Internet.

Unsolicited mass emails (UBE stands for Unsolicited Bulk Email) can deal with a variety of subjects (sexual, political, religious, chain messages, distress messages, political propaganda, pornography, denial, paedophilia, etc.); they can also be vectors of fraudulent or malicious content (viruses, etc.). Some of these unsolicited messages may be the result of handling errors or ignorance of netiquette 2, for example, the transmission of chain messages (hoax) [Rooksby, 2007].

Who are the spammers?

The spammer can simply be an individual wishing to build up a sending database and disseminate information (for example, each time his personal page is updated). It may be a traditional business wishing to sell its products. It can also be a marketing agency responsible for organizing “spamming” campaigns on behalf of a client. Finally, spammers can be spam professionals who are Internet specialists and seek maximum return regardless of the product for sale. Often technically sophisticated, they use (sometimes fraudulently) servers that they never keep very long, making sure that the shipments are not traceable. Recognized as the most abusive spammers, they are often the wealthiest.

How are addresses collected by spammers?

One might wonder why organizations are so "bombarded" with spam. The answer is simple: today many of them are represented on the Internet by a website, which usually provides a contact email address. There is software, called vacuum cleaners, which automatically searches for these addresses; very efficient, they are able to retrieve thousands of addresses per minute [Georgiou et al., 2008]. These addresses are then sold to spammers. Some address amalgamators do not hesitate to reconstitute the e-mail addresses of an organization from the names and first names of its employees, taking as the root the contact address indicated on the Internet (addresses that are simple to reconstitute are, for example, example, of the type firstname.lastname@organization.fr).

The costs of spam for organizations

According to the 2007 report of IronPort Systems, a division of Cisco and specialist in the protection of organizations against spam, a user would spend an average of five to ten minutes per day managing their spam. Today, spamming is a phenomenon reaching vast proportions, which wastes enormous resources of ISPs, organizations and individuals [Clement et al., 2008]. This section provides an assessment of the direct and indirect costs generated by spam for organizations.

Technical countermeasures

There are now several technological mechanisms that attempt to inhibit spam.

Antispam features of email clients

As basic protection, almost all email clients (such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc.) have anti-spam features, that is, automatic filter rules such as like blocking a sender or domain, maintaining a list of senders considered safe, etc. Thunderbird, in particular, has very interesting functions [Garance, Quatravaux AL and Quatravaux D., 2005]. The correct configuration of these filtering rules already allows efficient handling of emails and the blocking of a large part of spam. Yet it is difficult to set up a high level of spam control without the risk of malfunction.

Antispam software

Antispam software is exclusively dedicated to the protection of messages. They can be installed either directly on the user's workstation, on / upstream of the organization's mail server, or be fully outsourced. Current software implements a number of techniques, such as lists (black or white), filtering (lexical analysis, Bayesian filtering, logistic regression algorithms, URL analysis), collaborative signature databases, compression, weighting according to transaction history, secure identification on the server-side, DNS registration, real-time monitoring of SMTP activity, grubbing or even greylisting [Abraham et al., 2007; Becchetti et al., 2008; Chih-Chin, 2007; Fdez-Riverola et al. 2007; Gomes et al., 2007; Jiang, 2007; Lueg, 2005; Marson et al., 2009; Mengjun et al., 2008; Pera and Ng, 2009; Richard and Doncescu, 2008; Wei et al., 2008; Yu and Xu, 2008; Zheleva et al., 2008; Zorkadis et al., 2005] 

Legal means

First of all, it is necessary to remember that an e-mail address is a personal information, even if it does not include the name of the user, as long as it is attached to a natural person; therefore, spam is an indisputable invasion of privacy and represents an attack on the protection of personal data. According to the CNIL, some countries in the world (essentially the most advanced countries in terms of the use and dissemination of the Internet) are starting to legislate in the direction of the protection of the Internet user. The phenomenon of mass sending of unsolicited commercial and non-commercial emails is thus regulated from a legal point of view, with the aim of defining specific actions considered illegal and containing them by the threat of sanctions.

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