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Spam Over Internet Telephony (SPIT) to Come?
grub writes "According to this article on NewScientist.com 'Spam and spim - spam by instant messenger -- are about to be joined by "spit" - spam over internet telephony' Yup, spam via VoIP."
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I don't think that's how it works. I don't think anyone responds to your typical spam; rather, they harvest working emails and sell those to less-than-scrupulous companies. That's where the real profits are, so it doesn't matter if people respond or not.
I could be wrong though.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The response rates for spam mails are extremely low, but it's still more profitable than "traditional" commercials and ads, which means you get the same amount of customers with less investments. AFAICR, there's been a study about that about a year ago, but I can't find any link or reference anymore... :-/
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
One of the biggest problem of spam is the inability to identify the source (and why so many people believe that solutions like SPF will help out).
VoIP is end-to-end, so if someone starts "spitting" the network, he can easily be blocked.
Of course, other solutions would be to have white lists for VoIP, but it is weird to think about white lists to telephony, since the idea is that anyone could reach anyone.
I think dubious character companies will try to do it anyway for some time, but with time blocking will keep the problem to manageable levels.
Someone will be paying for lots of bandwidth, but the SPITers won't be paying most of it. Viruses, trojans and zombies oh my!
From what I've read, blind people are more impacted by plain ol' email spam than anyone. It takes a lot more time for them to listen for a screen reader start reciting off the latest anatomical enlargement offer than it does for a sighted person from scanning the text and just hitting "delete."
It may be over the internet, but at least vocal spam already has precedents in 'do not call lists' and such. I figure the more popular VoIP becomes, the faster this crap will get squshed. It won't take the decades phone spam legistlation took to enact. Everybody is taking a good, hard look at how to crush unwanted solicitations in every form these days.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Fortunately, VoIP is young enough such that they could modify the protocols to nip this in the bud.
Cryptographic solutions would probably be the first place to look. For example, suppose my phone will only look at incoming connections which are begun with some certificate signed by the VoIP service provider (Vonage, Skype, whatever). So, in order to be able to call me, your phone first contacts the provider, requests a certificate to connect to me, and the provider gives that to the phone, and then their phone uses that as credentials to get my phone to not ignore it. Then, all the service provider has to do is watch out for excessive numbers of connections coming from one customer.
I wouldn't be surprised in the least if this isn't already built into the VoIP systems. After all, we've been trying for some time now to move email into the domain of cryptographic authentication (SPF is just an intermediate fix) to stop spam. So, we've known for a while that this is "the way to do it right", and we also know from the way e-mail is going that it's a major pain to try to change the system to use it after the system is already in place. So, I'd expect that they might already have this capability.
I've often wondered what would happen if EVERYONE allocated just 5 minutes per day to "responding" to spam... heck we spend that long deleting the stuff or updating mail filters anyway.
Just pick a couple of spams and:
- View the web site
- If you can find an email address or contact form for the seller, abuse it. (do not use your own email address if possible)
- If you can find a free-call number, ring it - and keep them busy as long as you feel the need to - the company is paying for your call.
- Request free samples, forms to fill out or advertising material (printed form only, email is pointless). Fake the address, or if you like, grab the freebie
- Waste their time - time costs them more than anything else if they have to put on employees to deal with the crap.
- Waste their resources (web server time/bandwidth doesn't count, printer ink & shipping does)
If even 10% of their spam results in time wasters, the economics go right out the window
Unfortunately many spams link to a "insert credit card here, we will send goods" page with no other contact info, but many have links to the companies web site, and even an email to abuse (or better still anonymous contact form to prevent spam).
Any company that suffered such a manual DDOS attack would likely stop spamming - and as the spammers got less, the effect would get worse (well, better actually).
yes, some idiot will send out a spam on behalf of someone else just to get them attacked, but at least using human attakers there will be some basic checking.
As with all wars there will be casualties. At the moment that casualty is email, and EVERY internet user suffers for it.