Stop Spam Before It Stops You
Filed under: Internet
The reasons for stopping spam go well beyond the inconvenience it causes on a daily basis. Have you ever sent a message to a friend or business colleague only to have them not receive it? Estimates of ‘lost’ emails have been put as high as 5%, although 1 or 2% seems a more likely number. What that means, from a practical point of view is that if you send a message to 20 people, one of them will not receive it! No wonder more and more large businesses are internalising their mail services.
Furthermore, the small percentage of spam mail that does get through is highly likely to carry links to illegal (unlicensed) products, pump and dump stocks (illegal trading practice) or out and out scam sites. If the target is not a problem, the email itself may be - 95% of viruses are spread through spam email!
A further cause for concern is the so-called Denial of Service attack (DOS attack), which is popular on usenet amongst other mediums. The basic principle is a spammer flooding a location that provides useful anti-spam information, or in other cases a group destroying the means of communications of people who oppose the views of that group. Imagine a group on protecting your child from pornography suddenly being flooded with 10’s of thousands of messages advertising adult sites and how underage people can access them. This is an example of how the DOS attack works. You can no longer pick out the real messages from the flood of spammed messages, so you either spend a huge amount of time working through the spams to find the content, or more likely you give up on the group altogether.
The other common usage of DOS attack that falls outside the direct area of spam, is the use of zombie computers to ping popular servers. The theory here, as above, is to flood the computer with incoming information, although the goal is slightly different. In our spamming case above the objective is still to get advertising out there, even if it will only hide legitimate messages. In the case of a DOS attack on a server, the objective is to overflow the server with incoming information to the extent nothing BUT the DOS attack information can be used.
With an estimated 70-90 billion spam messages sent every day, the problem is not going away. Don’t wait for someone to solve the problem for you, visit The Stop Spam Now Site and review the very best methods of stopping spam.
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