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Spam Research Six Month Report
Zoomer writes "Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE), known popularly as 'spam.' Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users to wonder: How did these people get my e-mail address? In the summer of 2002, CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam." Update: 04/12 15:47 GMT by CN : About a minute after this went live, I found that michael posted this earlier. Mea culpa.
you can't just put your email address on your website like you once did
you can't add your email address to your usenet posts
even if you email someone and they get an email virus, then you're on every spam list this side of Mars faster than you can say kazaa
spam is harrasment, spam is bad, spam is undermining the internet. What would my mother think if she suddenly received "cum see horny l0litas" just because someone she emailed got a virus
Legally treat spammers like vandals I say.
.... E-mail addresses composed of short names and initials like bob@ or tse@, or basic combinations like smithj@ or toms@ will probably receive more spam. E-mail addresses need not be incomprehensible, but a user with a common or short name may want to modify or add to it in some way in his or her e-mail address.
For further information, please contact Ari Schwartz at the Center for Democracy & Technology, 202-637-9800, ari@cdt.org.
Anybody see the irony in that?
They mentioned that no spam was received from emails listed in the WHOIS database...
I'd be interested in seeing a study for companies that harvest snail mail addresses from the database.
I've received junk snail mail from every shady company on the face of the planet when I register a new domain or when it's up for renewal...plus I've even received phone calls (back when I used a real phone) about "we're ready to setup your web hosting and web design. Call us back immediately!" Persistant bugger, too...he kept calling back.
It's interesting to see those results. While I knew that spammers
harvested e-mail addresses from Web Sites, I didn't realize the
magnitude of it.
of the 10,000 spam messages they received over the six month period,
8,609 of them were from simply posting it publicly to a web site. I
always opt out of the subscription services where I can, and most of
the time I avoid posting any of my e-mail addresses publicly, now I
will redouble that effort.
They had some really useful suggestions also, my favorite was using
multiple "disposable" e-mail addresses and forwarding them to a main
e-mail address that you keep private. When you sign up for a site,
create a new disposable e-mail address and use that. If you start
getting spam from it, just shut off that disposable e-mail. That is
incredibly good advice.
I like the idea of disguising or masking your e-mail address,
although I think using HTML characters or a "Human readable"
equivalent is something that spammers will easily be able to
circumvent if the practice becomes widespread. They don't bother now
because not many people do it.
What I would like to see is a standard practice of generating your
posted e-mail address into an image. This would make it
*significantly* more difficult to harvest e-mail addresses in mass,
while remaining easy for a single use of sending someone an e-mail message.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
I'm happy to get all of this spam because it increases the effectiveness of my anti-spam system Herbivore. Herbivore is a distributed anti-spam system. Everybody that uses it increases it's accuracy. If you're interested, any Slashdot readers can get two years for free by entering "slashdot" as the promotional code. Help us fight spam!
We might look at this from a different perspective, if we eliminate all spam the 'penis enlargement' and 'hot barely legal lolitas that want you!' industries might collapse overnight.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
"Spam" ought to be CmdrTaco's category to update all by himself. It appears to be some weird obsession with him, since most people in his position just use one of the many freely-available tools and live with it.
Spam, the religion of CmdrTaco, who will soon declare SpamJihad on the troll community here, unleashing his SpamFedaykin-Slashbots! SPAM!
Mailshell.com tells me who spams me. You can assign yourself a "new" email address anytime, just by making it up when you give it to someone. The fake email is forwarded to your real address. So I have addresses like amazon@me.mailshell.com, etc. You can also direct any email that comes from a particular address to the trash, and never see it. I like it, I don't think it's too expensive. When I signed on it was still free.
No... that just means Hotmail receives a lot of spam. So many people use it that a reasonable proportion of possible usernames are taken, and that means spammers can and do use "dictionary" attacks, where they send e-mail to random usernames and then just hang onto the addresses that don't bounce.
I believe that big providers like Hotmail and Yahoo try reasonably hard to prevent people from sending spam from their accounts, as it uses up bandwidth and creates ill will, so they do things like limit number of recipients per message, or recipients per day, that sort of thing. (Can anyone confirm that?)
But a spammer can make their e-mails appear to come from whatever address they want, and if there's a URL in the message they don't need to worry about whether people can reply.
.... is the profile of the average spammer. Most of my spam is poorly spelled and frequently points to sites that don't have anything to sell. My suspicion, and I have no way of verifying it, is that most of these messages are sent by people who get suckered into a "Make Money From Home!" offer, send a few messages to a giant list of addresses, and then give up when they're not living in MC Hammer's mansion by the end of the week.
Does anyone know who the average spammer is?
Another cool piece of spam research I've never seen mentioned on Slashdot is the Bot Trap, which I learned about from this Little Green Footballs entry. If you're the admin for any web server, I strongly recommend setting this up. You probably don't make a huge dent in spam, but you get the satisfaction of seeing the list of IP's you thwarted.
grep -ri 'should work'
We found that posting our contact email addresses on a well known website was definitely the worst thing to do. There are some very aggressive email harvesters out there that just eat up website content and easily parse out the email addresses. Using some simple javascript tricks to assemble and display your email address piece by piece will defeat the current generation of harvesters.
Some of our old email accounts are now firmly planted in the email lists that these companies sell to each other and will "be in play" forever. Having received numerous offers to assemble and sell email lists (which we will never do), I know a little about these companies. Once your email is known by one of the big players, it will be sold to others in units of thousands for as little as pennies but sometimes up to a buck per thousand.
The /. effect on webservers. Obviously starting with their own.
A week later, spam to my hotmail account has dropped from 30 or so a day to about 2. (Warning: Hotmail support is only provided in the pay version, but there's a 30-day trial.) Preview the spam on the server, and you're able to delete it, blacklist it, and best of all, bounce it back to the sender. In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work so well. YMMV.
Another kick-ass product is Spam Gourmet. Some website wants your email address? Give them (unique identifer).(some number).(your user name)@spamgourmet.com . The number is the number of emails they can send before the address is killed, and the user name is your user name at spamgourmet. Go sign up, and you never have to go back to the site again. It works.
I'm sure many people are like me, and read these testimonials and figure that they're hype. Trust me. They're not. I wish I had done it the first time I read about them.
Just this past Wednesday night I discovered that I left the PDF version of this report sitting on my iBook from the last time this article was posted. Before I deleted it, I actually read the entire thing. Here's pretty much all you need to know:
1. Don't give out your e-mail address any more freely than you have to.
2. For the love of God, NEVER put it in unadulterated form (i.e. user@domain.com) in a Usenet posting or in a publicly-accessible HTML page-- even in the comments or other places that it won't appear on the final, rendered web page. If you do, it WILL get picked up and you WILL get an assload of spam.
3. If you MUST provide your address on a web page or Usenet posting, slightly obfuscating it (i.e. "user at domain dot com") is, for now, 100% effective against fooling the spambots. Which frankly I find amazing, because that trick has been around for years.
~Philly
I operate a domain, so it is easy to substitute a unique email address when I register for some suspect activity.
To my shock, one of the single greatest sources of spam that I have gotten is from an email address placed on a CA voter registration form. I've never actually used that address or given it out for anything before or since, and yet a year later I am still getting 3 or so emails a day showing up in my spam filter from that address.
To my knowledge not one of these spams actually came from the CA governement, but I can only infer that either they sold it, or there is some big public list of voter registration emails that spammers know about.
Since I've had an e-mail address I've had my penis extended 6 times, my breasts enlarged 8 times, I own the worlds supply of viagra and, and I get to have hot teen sex every night with 18 year old nymphos!
And to top it all off I've just received £3498435784354085 from Senator Hamza Kalu from Nigeria just for opening a bank account! ;)
DMCA regulates something that is strictly my own business, like do I watch my DVD under Windows or under Linux? If you send spam, you are making it a million people's business.
I tend to talk to people I know on the phone and just check my e-mail once per week to see if anyone sent a message about my programs. Even if you are right, I have to sit for 14 minutes doing nothing except deciding which messages with "Hi, Oleg" subject to open. And I deleted quite a few legitimate messages because I didn't recognize the address.
By the same token, if I went to sleep at 4am I won't want to have a chat with a telemarketer at 9. So I end up turning off my phone until I wake up and possibly missing calls from friends. And I don't want my physical mailbox to overflow just because I went on a one week trip during the holiday season. But spam is definitely the worst.
Communication between people is good. I should be able to publish my postal address, my phone number and by e-mail on the web and invite people to contact me if they looked at my stuff and want to chat. Remember when shareware came with a README file with all kind of contact information to send $15? I actually got a few nice snail mail letters with checks.
Spam has destroyed our ability for this kind of casual communication. People sending it or selling the products advertized make very little money compared to the value of our time or forced changes in our behaviour. It's time to stop them using technological, political or cultural methods, whatever works best.
While [posting to] "alt.sex.erotica" generated twice as much spam as the next newsgroup, we do not believe that this data supports any strong conclusion regarding which newsgroups are the most susceptible to spam.
Now, is that just wishful thinking on the authors' part :)
Just having an account can get you spam these days. Even at a university...especially at a university. Like any good system, my school's mail/student server is organized by year and/or alphabetized.
If any user changes up a directory...does an ls -1p > spamlist.txt and then mails said spamlist.txt to their friendly neighborhood spammer who pays them 20$...then all of those users just got added to somebody's hit parade, even if they never submitted their address to a public or private outlet.
I know this, because my email address is a bit ambiguous. One could email me at fake@university.edu or fake@xxx.university.edu and it would arrive in my mailbox. I have *NEVER* used this email address in any forum other than work-related issues and have *NEVER* used the "xxx" portion of the email when I have submitted it (in interest of brevity).
I currently procmail filter about a dozen different spammers (each sending different revisionary mails of each of their products) and invariably the address used is fake@xxx.university.edu (NOT the one I have ever used). Clearly someone determined what my account was named and then determined the mail server to be xxx.university.edu and put the two together. It's easy enough if you have an account on the server to simply list the home directories into a file and submit.
fake@xxx.university.edu is not listed on any google-indexed site or usenet article which furthers my belief that this came from within. Also, some spammers send the mails to about 15-20 university accounts at a time (they don't always hide the headers correctly and I get a cc list of about a dozen other users on my university's student server...ALL using xxx.university.edu).
These inside jobs are easy, do not negatively affect the committed party (unless the school is logging every ls command), and probably earn you enough money to buy a six-pack. A few beers for the inconvenience of your fellow students...great job, jerky.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
For the love of God, NEVER put it in unadulterated form (i.e. user@domain.com) in a Usenet posting or in a publicly-accessible HTML page
I still remember when guides for newbies told that not providing an usable return address was a breach of netiquette.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu