Spam (electronic) |
Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages in bulk. While its definition is usually limited to indiscriminate bulk mailing and not any targeted marketing, the term spam can refer to any commercially oriented, unsolicited bulk mailing perceived as being excessive and undesired. In the popular eye, the most common form of spam is that delivered in .
The name Spamming derives from the Monty Python Spam (Monty Python) about a diner which specializes in dishes made from SPAM brand processed meat, where at one point four Viking patrons in the diner began singing praises about SPAM which violently drowns out the normal dialogue in the sketch, hence SPAMming the dialogue. Another possible explanation is that everything on the menu comes with SPAM, therefore representing that you can t subscribe to something without receiving something you don t want. Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have effectively no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists. Because the barrier to entry is so low, the volume of unsolicited mail has produced other costs which are borne by the public (in terms of lost productivity and fraud) and by Internet service providers, which must add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in a number of jurisdictions, including the United States CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
=Overview=
==Historical background==
The terms spam and spamming have developed a negative connotation to mean mass abusive use of electronic communications. Similar complaints have been made of every mode of mass delivery of communication, from door-to-door salespeople to the latest abusers of Internet Telephony.
During the 20th century, with the development of the General Post Office (United Kingdom), this has become especially true of all mass postings (regardless of whether they have been for commercial or noncommercial senders), because the receivers of these unsolicited deliveries have often referred to them as mere junk mail .
With the advent of electronic communications each development has become used for unsolicited contacts. The telephone system was used for telemarketing and broadcast faxes once the facsimile machine became popular.
With the advent of the Internet Electronic mail, text messaging cellphones, Internet telephony, Instant Messaging, wikis and blogs, each has been abused to reach mass recipients, except that the cost of reaching larger audiences has plummeted to the point that solicitations are being made, even as the odds of a given solicitation s success approach zero.
The term spam was initially popularly used to refer to such abuse of newsgroups (USENET), but came to primarily refer to e-mail spam as this became the larger problem and spam became a part of common vocabulary, it has been used to refer to abuse of these other media: junk faxes, spam, sms spam, spit, spim, wikispam, blogspam.
In the past, households posted notices on their gates which stated no solicitors, but electronic media generally haven t been built with the foresight required to provide a place for such a virtual sign to be placed, and they generally aren t followed in any case. Spammers are criminals in most legal jurisdictions; they often falsely claim that the message was solicited, or hide their identity, or make unsubstantiated or false claims, and at a minimum commit trespass to chattels.
= References =
# CompuServe, Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., also America On-Line, Inc. v. IMS
==E-mail==
To send instant messages to millions of users on most IM services merely requires scriptable software and the recipients IM usernames. The ability to send e-mail from a computer program is built in to popular operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Unix. The only added ingredient is the list of addresses to target.
Sending bulk messages to recipients who have not solicited them has come to be known as spamming, and the messages themselves as spam. The etymology of the term is discussed #Etymology.
Although spam is merely an extension of mass communications through the ages, some have argued that spam is different because the costs, unlike with traditional methods, are borne disproportionately by the recipient and not by the sender. Spam is analogous to junk fax advertising, which also requires the recipient to carry the brunt of the cost. However, many older forms of advertising have similar cost distributions. For example, with cinema advertising, a ticket has been purchased to see a performance but the ticket holder becomes a paid captive audience for unsolicited advertising. Telephone, radio, and television advertising all require use of the recipient s own equipment if unsolicited mass marketing is to be achieved.
Regardless of its similarity to all forms of unsolicited mass communication, spamming is now regarded as a social problem. However, a search of statements concerning the development of commercial radio will reveal similar rhetoric by persons such as Herbert Hoover and John Reith as early in the 20th century as 1924.
All manner of attempts have been made to curb unsolicited mass communications by e-mail. These include filtering and the automated cancellation of netnews spam. Contractual measures such as Internet Service Providers acceptable use policy have also been employed. Laws such as the Can Spam Act of 2003 have also been introduced, but whether in the long term such laws can be sustained has yet to be determined.
==New forms of spam==
Every attempt to resist unsolicited, unwanted messages has been countered by more innovative ways of spamming. Today the growing importance of Search engines has led to a new form of spam called Spamdexing which aims at boosting a commercial site s page ranking (Spam (electronic)#Spam targeting search engines).
=Spamming in different media=
==E-mail spam==
E-mail spam is by far the most common form of spamming on the internet. It involves sending identical or nearly identical messages to a large number of recipients. Unlike legitimate commercial e-mail, spam is generally sent without the explicit permission of the recipients, and frequently contains various tricks to bypass e-mail filters.
Spammers obtain e-mail addresses by a number of means: harvesting addresses from Usenet postings, DNS listings, or Web pages; guessing common names at known domains (known as a dictionary attack ); and e-pending or searching for e-mail addresses corresponding to specific persons, such as residents in an area. Many spammers utilize programs called web spiders to find email addresses on web pages, although it is possible to fool the web spider by substituting the @ symbol with another symbol, for example # , while posting an email address.
Many e-mail spammers go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. They might do this by spoofing attack e-mail addresses (similar to Internet protocol spoofing). In this technique, the spammer modifies the e-mail message so it looks like it is coming from another e-mail address. However, many spammers also make it easy for recipients to identify their messages as spam by placing an ad phrase in the From field—very few people have names like GetMyCigs or Giving away playstation2s !
Among the tricks used by spammers to try to circumvent the filters is to intentionally misspell common spam filter trigger words. For example, viagra might become vaigra , or other symbols may be inserted into the word as in v/i/a/g./r/a . The human mind can handle a surprising degree of corruption (see [http://loopbiz.com/business.small/mind-gaps.html Wrod Illusinos]), but sometimes this tactic can backfire, rendering a message illegible. internet service providers have begun to use the misspellings themselves as a filtering test.
The most dedicated spammers—often those making a great deal of money or engaged in illegal activities, such as the pornography, casinos and Nigerian scammers—are often one step ahead of the ISPs. Reporting them to your ISP may help block less sophisticated spammers in the future.
So-called spambots are a major producer of email spam. The worst spammers create computer virus that will render an unprotected PC a zombie computer ; the zombie will inform a central unit of its existence, and the central unit will command the zombie to send a low volume of spam. This allows spammers to send high volumes of email without being caught by their ISPs or being tracked down by antispammers; a low volume of spam is instead sent from many locations simultaneously. Many consumer-level ISPs (EarthLink, for example) stop spambots by blocking the SMTP port (computing) (port 25), although there are some users who make legitimate use of it.
==Messaging spam==
Messaging spam, sometimes termed spim , makes use of instant messaging systems, such as AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ. Many IM systems offer a directory of users, including demographic information such as age and sex. Advertisers can gather this information, sign on to the system, and send unsolicited messages. Spammers have similarly targeted Internet Relay Chat channels, using IRC bots that join channels and bombard them with advertising messages.
A similar sort of spam can be sent with the Messenger Service in Microsoft Windows. The Messenger Service is an server message block facility intended to allow servers to send pop-up alerts to a Windows workstation. When Windows systems are connected to the Internet with this service running and without an adequate firewall, it can be used to send spam. The Messenger Service can, however, be easily disabled. [http://www.itc.virginia.edu/desktop/docs/messagepopup/]
Messenger service spam, in particular, has lent itself to spammer use in a particularly circular scheme. In many cases, messenger spammers send messages to vulnerable Windows machines consisting of text like Annoyed by these messages Visit this site. The link leads to a Web site where, for a fee, users are told how to disable the Windows messenger service. Though the messenger service is easily disabled for free by the user, this scam works because it creates a perceived need and then offers an immediate solution. Oftentimes, the only annoying messages the user is receiving through messenger are advertisements to disable messenger itself.
==Newsgroup spam==
Newsgroup spam predates e-mail spam, and targets Usenet newsgroups. Old Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). Since posting to newsgroups is nearly as easy as sending e-mails, newsgroups are a popular target of spammers. The Breidbart Index was developed to provide an objective measure of the spamminess of a multi-posted or cross-posted message on Usenet.
==Forum spam==
Spamming an internet forum is when a user posts something which is off-topic or doesnt have anything to do with the current subject. Also, a post that doesnt contribute to the thread what so ever are also considered spam in some cases.
==Mobile phone spam==
Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to consumers not only for the inconvenience but also because they sometimes have to pay to receive the text message.
==Internet telephony spam==
It has been predicted that voice over IP (VoIP) communications will be vulnerable to being spammed by prerecorded messages. Although there have been few reported incidents, some companies have already tried to sell defenses against it. [http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3398331]
=Spam targeting search engines=
==Spamdexing==
Spamdexing (a combination of spamming and indexing ) refers to the practice on the World Wide Web of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. People who do this are called search engine spammers. See also Google Bombing. In layman s terms, spamdexing is anything done to improve search engine ranking.
==Blog, wiki, and guestbook spam==
Google s PageRank system uses the number of links to a page as an index of its importance . Ordinarily, very few pages will link to a spammer s commercial site, because it is of no interest to anyone else, and hence it will have a very low PageRank score. To counter this effect, spammers attempt to create links to their sites on other people s pages.
The most common targets for this kind of spam are weblogs, the spamming then being known as blog spam, or blam for short. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer s commercial web site. [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.htmlpg=7]
Similar attacks are often performed against Wikis and guestbooks, both of which accept user contributions.
On January 18, 2005, Google proposed a rel= nofollow attribute that could be placed on a link; doing so instructs most major search engines to ignore the link, rendering it useless to spammers. Software is then rewritten to add this attribute to any link embedded in a comment. As of April 2005, nofollow has seen expanding usage, but is not yet universal. [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html]
As well as comment forms, editable pages and guestbooks, some sites publish a list of the most common referrers (see Referer) to their site in order to show how readers have found it. These lists have also been exploited by spammers with so-called referer spam, in which the spammer makes repeated web site requests using a fake referer url pointing to a spam-advertised site. That URL will later appear as a link on the site, boosting the PageRank of its target.
= Commercial uses =
The most common purpose for spamming is advertising. Goods commonly advertised in spam include pornography which can be in the form of BIF spam or plain text, unlicensed computer software, medical products such as Viagra, credit card accounts, and fad products. In part because of the bad reputation (and dubious legal status) which spamming carries, it is chiefly used to carry offers of an ill-reputed or legally questionable nature. Many of the products advertised in spam are fraudulent in nature, such as quackery and Make money fasts. Spam is frequently used to advertise scams, such as diploma mills, advance fee fraud, pyramid schemes, stock pump and dump schemes, and Phishing. It is also often used to advertise pornography without regard to the age of the recipient, or the legality of such material in the recipient s location.
Spam has different levels of acceptability in different countries. For example, in Russia spamming is commonly used by many mainstream legitimate businesses, such as travel agencies, printing shops, training centers, real estate agencies, seminar and conference organizers, and even self-employed electricians and garbage collection companies. In fact, the most prominent Russian spammer was American English Center, a language school in Moscow. That spamming sparked a powerful antispam movement, enraging the deputy minister of communications Andrey Korotkov and provoking a wave of counterattacks on the spammer through non-Internet channels, including a massive telephone DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.
== Comparison to postal junk mail ==
There are a number of differences between spam and junk mail:
*Unlike junk postal mail, the costs of spam paid for by the recipient s mail site commonly approach or even exceed those of the sender, in terms of bandwidth, CPU processing time, and storage space. Spammers frequently use free dial-up accounts, so their costs may be quite minimal indeed. Because of this offloading of costs onto the recipient, many consider spamming to be criminal conversion or theft. *Junk mail can be said to subsidize the delivery of mail customers want to receive. For example, the United States Postal Service allows bulk mail senders to pay a lower rate than for first-class mail, because they are required to sort their mailings and apply bar codes, which makes their mail much cheaper to process. While some ISPs receive large fees from spammers, most do not—and most pay the costs of carrying or filtering unwanted spam. *Another distinction is that the costs of sending junk mail provide incentives to be somewhat selective about recipients, whereas the spammer has much lower costs, and therefore much less incentive. *Finally, bulk mail is by and large used by businesses that are traceable and can be held responsible for what they send. Spammers frequently operate on a fly-by-night basis, using the so-called anarchy of the Internet as a cover.
= Noncommercial spam =
E-mail and other forms of spamming have been used for purposes other than advertisements. Many early Usenet spams were religious or political in nature. Serdar Argic, for instance, spammed Usenet with historical revisionist screeds. A number of evangelism have spammed Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages.
Spamming has also been used as a denial of service tactic, particularly on Usenet. By overwhelming the readers of a newsgroup with an inordinate number of nonsense messages, legitimate messages can be lost and computing resources are consumed. Since these messages are usually forged (that is, sent falsely under regular posters names) this tactic has come to be known as sporgery (from spam + forgery ). This tactic has for instance been used by partisans of the Church of Scientology against the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup (see Scientology vs. the Internet) and by spammers against news.admin.net-abuse.email, a forum for mail administrators to discuss spam problems. Applied to e-mail, this is termed mailbombing. The Meow Wars was a case of some persons launching Usenet denial of service attacks on various newsgroups.
In a handful of cases, forged e-mail spam has been used as a tool of , a California attorney, have been targeted.
Spammers have also abused resources set up for purposes of anonymous speech online, such as anonymous remailers. As a result, many of these resources have been shut down, denying their utility to legitimate users.
E-mail computer virus may be spammed to set up an initial pool of infected machines, which then resend the virus to other machines in a spam-like manner. The infected machines can often be used as remote-controlled zombie computers, for more conventional spamming or DDoS attacks. Sometimes Trojan horse (computing)s are spammed to phish for bank account details, or to set up a pool of zombies without using a virus.
= Etymology =
The term spam is derived from the Monty Python Spam (Monty Python), set in a cafe where everything on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. As the server recites the SPAM-filled menu, presently a chorus of Vikings drowns her out with a song, repeating SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM and singing lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM over and over again, drowning out all conversation. The excessive amount of SPAM in the sketch comes from British rationing in World War II, SPAM was one of the few foods that was not restricted and widely available; so by the time of the sketch, the British were fed up with the luncheon meat.
On the other hand spam is also associated with the innovative advertising campaign which Hormel Foods Corporation started in 1937 promoting with their canned meat product, SPAM. For the first time a commercial advertising campaign has engaged very intensive mass media marketing tools frequently emitted radio spots, shows and the first singing radio commercial and even a weekly radio show. This is another possible connection between the term spam and the meat product, although the Monty Python link is more contemporary and more likely.
Although the [http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html first known instance of unsolicited commercial e-mail] occurred in 1978 (unsolicited electronic messaging had already taken place over other media, with the first recorded instance being via telegram on September 13 1904), the term spam for this practice had not yet been applied. In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented Bulletin Board Systems and MUDs, who would repeat SPAM a huge number of times to scroll other users text off the screen. In the early Chat rooms in services like PeopleLink and the early days of AOL, they actually flooded the screen with sizeable quotes from the Monty Python routine. This was generally used as a tactic by insiders of a particular group who wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. This act, previously termed flooding or trashing , came to be called spamming as well. [http://groups.google.com/groupsthreadm=MAT.90Sep25210959%40zeus.organpipe.cs.arizona.edu] By analogy, the term was soon applied to any large amount of text broadcast by one user, or sometimes by many users.
It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting —the repeated posting of the same message. The first evident usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath of the ARMM (Usenet) incident of March 31 1993, in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup. Soon, this use had also become established—to spam Usenet was to flood newsgroups with junk messages.
Commercial spamming started in force on March 5, 1994, when a pair of lawyers, Canter & Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the Green Card spam , after the subject line of the postings. The two went on to widely promote spamming of both Usenet and e-mail as a new means of advertisement—over the objections of Internet users they labeled anti-commerce radicals. Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and antispam efforts) moved chiefly to e-mail, where it remains today. [http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html]
There are two popular fake etymology of the word spam . The first, promulgated by Canter & Siegel themselves, is that spamming is what happens when one dumps a can of SPAM luncheon meat into a fan blade. The second is the backronym shit posing as mail.
. However, Hormel has begun to press the trademark issue—first, when a firm registered the trademark SpamArrest in 2003, Hormel sued to invalidate the mark, [http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6419416.htm], and more recently two failed attempts to revoke the mark spambuster .[http://www.lawreports.co.uk/chanjanf0.3.htm], [http://www.patent.gov.uk/tm/legal/summaries/2002/o04802.htm]
== Alternate meanings ==
The term spamming is also used in the older sense of something repetitious and disruptive by players of first-person shooter computer games. In this sense, it refers to area denial tactics—repeatedly firing rockets or other explosive shells into an area—or to any tactic whereby a large volume of ammunition is expended in the hope of either scoring chance hits, covering teammates advance with suppressive fire, or clearing or defending an area from an enemy presence.
Whether such tactics are viewed as cheating or abusive varies from game to game, community to community. Analogous to Camping_%28computer_gaming%29, the tactical advantage gained by those thus engaged is the crux of the issue. If every player Defense_%28sport%29 spams , and no one makes the Offense_%28sports%29 push, there will be no opportunities for players to come into conflict, and thus there will be no game. Games like Capture the Flag help to break this deadlock by providing incentive to invade enemy territory, however risky.
Conversely, the same term may be used to describe those who flood the in-game chat with needlessly profuse and/or frequent messaging, similar to messaging spam mentioned above. Although perceptions vary within the gaming community, in most arenas excessive messaging is unwelcome. On the other hand, in the role-playing games MUD, MUSH, and MUCK, players happily continue using the word in this original sense, with no implication of abuse. When a player returns to the terminal after a brief break to find her screen wonderfully filled with pages of random chat, it s still called spam . [http://www.graphxpress.com/cgi-bin/wcotp.cgidate=19980407]
= Costs of spam =
Spam s direct effects include the consumption of computer and network resources, and the cost in human time and attention of dismissing unwanted messages. In addition, spam has costs stemming from the kinds of spam messages sent, from the ways spammers send them, and from the arms race between spammers and those who try to stop or control spam.
The methods of spammers are likewise costly. Because spamming contravenes the vast majority of ISPs acceptable-use policies, most spammers have for many years gone to some trouble to conceal the origins of their spam. E-mail, Usenet, and instant-message spam are often sent through insecure proxy servers belonging to unwilling third parties. Spammers frequently use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up disposable accounts at various Internet service providers. In some cases, they have used falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to quickly move from one account to the next as each one is discovered and shut down by the host ISPs.
The costs of spam also can be taken to include the collateral costs of the struggle between spammers and the administrators and users of the media threatened by spamming. [http://linxnet.com/misc/spam/thank_spammers.html]
Many users are bothered by spam because it impinges upon the amount of time they spend reading their e-mail. Many also find the content of spam frequently offensive, in that pornography is one of the most frequently advertised products. Spammers send their spam largely indiscriminately, so pornographic ads may show up in a work place e-mail inbox—or a child s, the latter of which is illegal in many jurisdictions. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in spam advertising websites that contain child pornography.
Some spammers argue that most of these costs could potentially be alleviated by having spammers reimburse ISPs and individuals for their material. There are two problems with this logic: first, the rate of reimbursement they could credibly budget is unlikely to be nearly high enough to pay the cost; and second, the human cost (lost mail, lost time, and lost opportunities) is basically unrecoverable.
E-mail spam exemplifies a tragedy of the commons: spammers use resources (both physical and human), without bearing the entire cost of those resources. In fact, spammers commonly do not bear the cost at all. This raises the costs for everyone. In some ways spam is even a potential threat to the entire email system, as operated in the past.
Since e-mail is so cheap to send, a tiny number of spammers can saturate the Internet with junk mail. Although only a tiny percentage of their targets are motivated to purchase their products (or fall victim to their scams), the low cost sometimes provides a sufficient conversion rate to keep spamming alive. Furthermore, even though spam appears not to be economically viable as a way for a reputable company to do business, it suffices for professional spammers to convince a tiny proportion of gullible advertisers that it is viable for those spammers to stay in business. Finally, new spammers go into business every day, and the low costs allow a single spammer to do a lot of harm before finally realizing that the business is not profitable.
= Political issues =
Spamming remains a hot discussion topic. In fact, many online users have even suggested (presumably jokingly) that cruel forms of capital punishment would be appropriate for spammers. In 2004, the seized Porsche of an indicted spammer was advertised on the internet; this revealed the extent of the financial rewards available to those who are willing to commit duplicitous acts online. However, some of the possible means used to stop spamming may lead to other side effects, such as increased government control over the Net, loss of privacy, barriers to free expression, and even the commercialization of e-mail.
One of the chief values favored by many long-time Internet users and experts, as well as by many members of the public, is the free exchange of ideas. Many have valued the relative anarchy of the Internet, and bridle at the idea of restrictions placed upon it. A common refrain from spam-fighters is that spamming itself abridges the historical freedom of the Internet, by attempting to force users to carry the costs of material which they would not choose.
An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU has to do with so-called stealth blocking , a term for ISPs employing aggressive spam blocking without their users knowledge. These groups concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to reduce spam-related costs may select tools which (either through error or design) also block non-spam e-mail from sites seen as spam-friendly . SPEWS is a common target of these criticisms. Few object to the existence of these tools; it is their use in filtering the mail of users who are not informed of their use which draws fire.
Some see spam-blocking tools as a threat to free expression—and laws against spamming as an untoward precedent for regulation or taxation of e-mail and the Internet at large. Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat some spam as unlawful merely by applying existing laws against trespass and conversion, some laws specifically targeting spam have been proposed. In 2004, United States passed the Can Spam Act of 2003 which provided ISPs with tools to combat spam. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric Head, reportedly one of the biggest spammers in the world, who settled the lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004. But the law is criticized by many for not being effective enough. Indeed, the law was supported by some spammers and organizations which support spamming, and opposed by many in the antispam community. Examples of effective anti-abuse laws that respect free speech rights include those in the U.S. against unsolicited faxes and phone calls, and those in Australia and a few U.S. states against spam.
= Court cases =
Robert Soloway, ranked one of the top-10 spammers in the world, has been vanquished in a federal court by the operator of a small Oklahoma-based Internet service provider.
Yesterday, U.S.Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff Robert Braver (pictured) for a default judgment and permanent injunction against Soloway. The judgment includes a statutory damages award of $10,075,000 under Oklahoma law.
= Newsgroups =
=See also=
==Background==
= External links =
== Anti-spam organizations ==
== Anti-spam articles and publications ==
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