There is a growing sentiment in some business circles that spam can be clearly defined by what is and isn’t allowed under the typical anti-spam legislation enacted by governments these days.

In the US the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 (the acronym drawn from the bill’s full name “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing”) effectively legalized spam by applying three basic requirements to commercial emails:

• Visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism, with requests honored within 10 days
• Accurate content such as From: fields and subject lines, and includes a legitimate physical address of the advertiser
• Not sent via open relay, does not contain false headers, and is not sent to harvested email addresses

Some organizations have taken this legal standard and run with it, sending commercial email to addresses obtained through bought lists, co-registration, incentive offers, and other innocuous means such as when filling out forms or dropping business cards into prize draws at conferences.

And to comply with the unsubscribe requirements they use onerous mechanisms for unsubscribe requests instead of simple one-click methods.

And while doing all of this they insist that it’s not spam.  After all, the law says so.  It’s just perfectly legitimate email marketing.

You Don’t Get to Decide

I’m sorry, but you don’t get to decide that.  And by “you” I mean businesses.  Businesses and their marketing departments who look at email as a fast, convenient way to reach a lot of people with their very important messages.

Now for the purposes of this discussion I’ll make some definitions clear.  I’m not talking about the kind of spam that botnets send out to try and trick people into buying fake pharmaceutical goods or a counterfeit watch. Continue reading Who Gets to Decide if it’s Spam? Not you, Mr Marketer»

There have recently been two publicized, high profile attacks on email marketing services.  The two services are Aweber and iContact, each confirming the attacks within about a month of each other.

These companies, and many others like them, provide email marketing services to websites and other online businesses.  Email marketing, when done properly, is a legitimate practice and is not spam although some people do not make the distinction between the two.

A legitimate email marketing service will require a subscriber to deliberately opt-in to a list, usually by sending them a confirmation email before they are added to a marketer’s email list.  This stops spammers from simply harvesting email addresses, importing them into one of these services, and starting to spam them.

This opt-in requirement, plus other measures, assures a high deliverability rate for the customers of the email marketing service because antispam systems on the receiving end can have a high level of confidence that the marketing messages are opt-in and not spam.

Among the more paranoid web users there is a tendency to use unique emails for each mailing list that they sign up to.  So if they were to sign up to ABC Corp’s mailing list, they would use paul_abc@somewhere.com, and then for XYZ Pty Ltd would use paul_xyz@somewhere.com.

This might seem like a lot of hassle to go to, generating unique email addresses for every list you subscribe to, but when the attacks on these companies occurred it was these people who noticed the problem first.  Suddenly their secret, unique addresses began receiving pharmaceutical spam emails.   Your average person who uses one single email address probably would not have noticed this additional spam.

Initial reports were sketchy but eventually first Aweber, and then later iContact determined that a data breach had occurred in their systems.  In both cases the outcome was the same – subscriber email addresses were compromised, but customer account and billing information was not. Continue reading Email Marketing Services Targetted by Hackers»

British ISPs have reacted strongly to the suggestion of Trend Micro CTO David Rand that the ISPs should actively combat the problem of spam on the internet.

Rand’s suggestion is the blocking of TCP port 25 (the port used for SMTP, or email, communications between servers on the internet), making contact with customers who they suspect may be the source of spam outbreaks, as well as stronger government legislation.

The legislation idea has merit, after all the lack of cooperation between government agencies is how many international spam operations manage to go unpunished.  The blocking of SMTP on the other hand is impractical and costly to implement, both from a technical and a service perspective.

The basis of the idea is this.  Customers send mail using SMTP, therefore by blocking SMTP and requiring that customers send mail via the ISP’s mail servers allows close monitoring of email traffic and detection of spam.

The solution is problematic though because many ISP customers, both home users as well as businesses, have perfectly good reasons to not send their email via their ISPs mail servers.  These customers would need to be unblocked from using SMTP, and hence cannot be closely monitored.

The monitoring itself also presents two problems – firstly customers object to having their email correspondence inspected by other parties including their ISP.  Secondly, any false positives could have disastrous consequences if important emails were blocked.  ISPs do not want the exposure to liability if they block an email that results in monetary loss for the sender or recipient. Continue reading ISPs Don’t Want to be Spam Cops»

Business Week reports that a study by researchers in New York reveals that as many as one in five young, overweight people have been a victim of email spam.

The study revealed some interesting statistics:

• 88% of overweight individuals reported receiving spam pitching weight loss products, compared to 73% of other respondents
• 42% of overweight individuals said they opened the spam, compared to 18% of other respondents
• 18% of overweight individuals said they bought products promoted in the emails, compared to just 5% of other respondents

Firstly why do overweight people receive more weight loss spam?  One theory is that these people are visiting more web sites on that topic than other people, and therefore end up in marketing databases.  This means that the spam is either coming from the website owner, or another party that is given access to the database of email addresses.  This access may be either from selling the list or by using co-registration, which is a legitimate lead-sharing strategy that is often abused by spammers.

For any email marketer a 42% open rate is outstanding.  It means that the subject line for the email was very effective at enticing the recipient to open the email and read more.

For a spammer sending 1,000,000 emails 42% open rates do not mean 420,000 people opened them.  Most of those recipients will never receive the spam due to anti-spam protection on their email server or their computer.  But even a 1% penetration could mean several thousand people open the email.

Finally the conversion rate for overweight people is very good at 18%.  Several hundred conversions of a weight loss product likely to cost $50-$200 is a good day’s pay for the spammer. Continue reading Weight Loss Scams Reveal Why Spam Works»

It has been a big year for the internet with social networks continuing to grow at an amazing pace, search engines scrambling to keep pace with user demand for fresh news, and as always spam and malware causing havoc around the world.

A look at the year’s major spam event shows some consistent trends.

• Season spam such as Valentine’s Day and Christmas remains predictable
• Spammers quickly move to exploit any major global news events such as celebrity deaths and wars
• Spam networks are becoming more distributed and resistant to shutdown attempts
• Social networking spam is on the rise as spammers attempt to exploit the perceived trust between people and their online “friends”
• Human error continues to be a big part of the spam landscape, both through inadvertent data exposure and through people falling victim to social engineering

Here is a look at some of these major events throughout the year.

January

Scams promising free money from US government grants attempts to exploit the news of corporate bailouts and the increase in unemployment.

Fake CCN news alerts take advantage of a clash between Israel and Hamas.

Global spam volume begin returning to normal levels after the McColo shutdown of November 2008.

The inauguration of US President Barack Obama leads to a wave of spam spreading rumours that his inauguration is invalid or that he resigned and attempts to trick users in downloading malware.

Spammers also get a head start on Valentine’s Day with malware-carrying love letters.

February

Human error at Google marked the entire internet unsafe (is it really that far from the truth?).

The poor economy continues to cause unemployment to increase, leading to a new wave of fake job spam.

Microsoft offeres a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Conficker worm creators.

March

Citibank falls for a Nigerian 419 scam to the tune of $27 million, but is saved when the transfers fail due to invalid account numbers provided by the scammers. Continue reading 2009, The Year in Spam»

I came across an article today written last week that proclaimed “We won the war on spam”.  The general thrust of the article is that “despite continued hysteria, unwanted e-mail is largely a thing of the past”.

This is an interesting point of view which I happen to disagree with, but in thinking further I realize that this is mostly a matter of perspective – business vs personal, or big vs small.

The writer, Mark Gimein, approaches the matter from his own personal experience.  Mark has a slightly more complex email setup than the average person – a series of email addresses for various purposes all forwarding into a Gmail account.  In Mark’s experience spam has all but vanished from his inbox, although a few false negatives remain.

I’m not disputing Mark’s account, I don’t see very much spam slip through the filters into my inbox either, but the war on spam is most definitely not won.  Mark hints at what I’m about to say with this paragraph in his article:

Stopping spam does take effort—without a doubt Yahoo and Google devote resources to it. But that’s just part of their business, no different from all the other things they need to do to keep their e-mail systems running. What matters is that from the point of view of users like me, what’s going on under the hood to keep junk out and legitimate messages in needn’t concern us.

For an email user in a business what goes on under the hood shouldn’t concern them, but it most certainly concerns the business.  Businesses spend thousands of dollars each year on protecting their email systems from spam and malware.  This is not a trivial expense and in itself stands as solid proof that the war on spam is far from over. Continue reading We Have Not Won The War On Spam»

The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that a new scam is making the rounds in the land down under. A perpetrator of a phishing scam has created an email scam, claiming to be the Australian Tax Office (ATO). The email promises Aussie taxpayers a $250 bonus with their tax return, and sends them to an online form that asks for their tax information, along with their bank account data.

The web site containing the form then asks the victim to mail a printed copy of the form to an address. The print-and-send is just a ruse though, the data is actually captured through a hack when the victim presses the “print” button. The email, like many such scams, attempts to create a sense of false security, by claiming the print-and-send routine is being done for the victim’s safety.

Officials still have not been able to trace the source of the fraudulent email sender, who is using a bot network to send the emails. The ATO recommends that people delete emails like this immediately, and advises that they do not ask people to provide personal information by email. The same holds true for most, if not all, tax collecting agencies in other countries.

A new spam campaign appears to be coming from hijacked Yahoo, Hotmail, and GMail accounts. The messages all advertise Chinese electronics and apparel retailers (and it’s a sure bet that the products they sell are counterfeits!) and look something like this:

          How are u doing these days?Yesterday I found a web of a large trading company from china,which is an agent of all the well-known digital product factories,and facing to both wholesalers,retailsalers,and personal customer all over the world. They export all kinds of digital products and offer most competitive and reasonable price and high quality goods for our clients,so i think we you make a big profit if we do business with them.And they promise they will provide the best after-sales-service.In my opinion we can make a trial order to test that.

A Washington Post columnist reported a family member’s Yahoo account had indeed been hijacked by the scammers and used to send spam like the one above to everyone in his address book. The scammers also deleted the last 30 days of messages in his sent folder and tacked their spam on to his signature file. A virus scan turned up no infections, indicating perhaps the hijack had been the result of the user falling for a previous phishing attack, or perhaps even a hacked server on each of the webmail providers affected.

Continue reading Asian Spam Coming From Hijacked Webmail Accounts»

I’ve received dozens of emails like this one, and file them along with the notices that I’ve won a million dollars, and that somebody I don’t know needs my help to distribute their wealth. That is, emails that offer a “work-at-home” scheme processing payments for somebody. I never knew exactly what the scam was, I only knew there was a scam involved. The content of the message lays out a work-at-home scheme where you are asked to open a bank account, and then you take payments on behalf of the company, and then forward the money to them.

Continue reading When work-at-home could get you arrested»