SPAM
Spam can best be described as unwanted email which floods our inboxes. Spam is largely commercial in nature, selling all sorts of products ranging from software to viagra and porn. Spam has become a major universal problem. One of the adverse effects is the load that spam places on web servers and bandwidth.
Spam and the security issue
The majority of spam is sent using open proxies, which allow any network address to connect and to serve as a means for untraceable spam. Installation of a Trojan horse program called "botnet" is also possible on open proxies, and thus poses a great threat. Other threats are :
- Identity Theft - certain spam is known as phishing (see phishing), in which a user is lured into divulging sensitive information which can lead to identity theft.
- Viruses - the spamming technique is often used by viruses to propagate themselves.
- Scams - scammers use spam to distribute their scams.
Spam Filters
Although spam filters are widely used, they are not totally effective against the overall spam problem. Detection techniques include whitelists, blacklists, keywords etc. However, these detection techniques are not fool-proof. The down-side of the filters is that a lot of legitimate email is blocked and this affects a lot of publishers of newsletters negatively. New anti-spam measures are continuously being introduced, but this leads to the spammers developing newer techniques, in order to trick the filters.
Spam and Virus - Combined
It seems that spammers and virus writers have ganged up. Some spam actually contain viruses, as was illustrated by the Sobig worm, which turned PC's into spamming tools. Should enough machines be infected by worms such as these, spam is increased vastly, by flooding web servers, with the ultimate goal of bringing certain websites to a halt (called a DoS - denial of service attack).
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