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Spam is Back With A Vengence
Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before.
In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."
Akismet is what a lot of Wordpress users (and many other bloggers) use to prevent comment spam. They've got a pretty neat stats page that shows the volume of spam they have blocked from their creation. They are relatively new, so the fact that the graph trends upwards so quickly also has to do with the fact that their userbase is still growing. But it's unquestionable how large a spike I saw in the end of November and December. Particularly over the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday weekends. I have a personal server in my house that was MELTED by the amount of hits to my dinky little blog. It would go up and then 30 seconds later would be unresponsive and have to be forcefully rebooted. It even killed my D-Link router.
I'm posting AC so slashdot doesn't melt my server again...
Well then I know what to do about my pesky competitors, just have some spammers send spam in their name! Problem solved!
So who do you want to monitor everybody's commerical actions? Actually, to know that the person bought a product because of spam, we'd need to monitor them whenever they check their email. Big Brother go!
In the name of Karl Popper, though, I appreciate your proposals.
I can see you've never worked at an ISP. A customer who is cut off could not care less about why, all they want is to be reconnected immediately and with no work on their part. They will threaten leaving your service, lawsuits, and practically death threats if you do not reconnect them.
Seriously, why won't this work?
Primarily it becomes an issue of volume. One call to a customer with an abusive machine will eat up the profit from that customer for months. You can't just call them and say "fix it", you have to handhold them through the process or you will almost certainly lose their revenue altogether.
It happens, but not that often. When they catch one, law enforcement does a dog and pony show and we applaud wildly. But they just keep coming.
Arrests don't seem to happen that often. Do a google for "spammer arrested", and most of the hits are about the Buffalo spammer. He was arrested back in 2003 to much fanfare. However my mailbox is still full of. Maybe there is more than one of them out there?
I'm guessing spammers spam because they know the chance of them being caught is nigh on zero. Yet, this is a criminal racket just like any other criminal racket. If some serious money is put into law enforcement, then spammers might finally get the shakes. Apart from pump-n-dump stocks (get off yer asses SEC), spammers aren't hard to catch. Consider Mortgage spammers. If you reply to a Mortgage spam (I am told) you will later be called by a seemingly unrelated mortgage agency. They have bought your contacts off the spammers. Everything can be traced, and if we have the feds seeded spammers with 1-use-only phone numbers, buying stuff and tracking it just like they do any other illegal contraband, of course they can bust it. Make receiving spammed contact details an offence too: The recipient must be reasonably confident that the leads they received are not spam. Harder to prove, but if there is a reasonable chance of prosecution buyers of spam harvests will become shyer and the market dry up. Lets make it a legal requirement that ISPs have to report spamming users to the feds.
And let's get beyond "fines" for offenders. Fines for any profitable business are merely an operating expense. What really scares company directors is Jail time. This has been used in L.A. to force companies comply with laws they'd otherwise have simply paid out. If a spammer thinks there is a 0.0001% chance of him being caught (and then let off with a warning), they will do it. If they think they probably can't sell their harvest, have a 50% chance of being caught and will definitely go to Jail, they won't!
So why isn't this happening? (1) It's not an issue for politicans. I want to see Obama/Hillary/McCain arguing about Spam!!! and so... (2) The money isn't budgeted for law enforcement. With some Elliot Nesses on Spam, I reckon we can crack this. How do we let the politicians know this is an issue for us?
1) many of the companies that are promoted in the pump and dump schemes are not involved and often dont know for months that they are also victims of the spam. basically its hard to know who really is (spam coming from open relays etc)
2) most of these stocks are what they call pink slip or OTC (over the counter) stocks not traded on exchages like the NYSE or CME, thus not falling under the SEC (i think, please correct me here im no stock expert)
3) it appears that these spams are more of a scam to drive people to brokerages, or stock advisors. if you google one of the symbols in the spams, you will find very shady looking, hastily constructed sites who's sole purpose is to grab the #1 google ranking for the word "spam" and the symbol in the email.
I could be wrong about the purpose but I think there is more to this scam than pump and dump. ymmv.
meep
My ISP (www.ntlworld.com) doesn't allow you to use www if your connection has a high amount of outgoing port 25 action. I know this because a PC here got infected with a mass-mailer trojan once. Instead of seeing the webpage you're trying to see, you are shown a page telling you that you've been infected, along with access to several tools for removing these kind of infections. If ALL ISPs did this, I would think that spam traffic would be heavily reduced.
I wonder if these "pump and dump" schemes are still working? This round of image spam has been going on for months now, so I'd expect that people just delete them. Even shorting these stocks may not be profitable at this point, which is why I think you are right, there is something else going on here. I wonder if this is some type of money laundering scheme?
As for retribution, if these are "shady looking, hastily constructed sites", then they are your targets. If I was more skilled and so inclined, I would be "analyzing" those sites.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I know of no good ISP that bans such servers. Nor would I use any that did - that's retarded... I'm paying for the bandwidth and it's mine to use.
Ok numbnuts, that's exactly the kind of attitude that spammers have. That they can do anything because they pay for it. You pay taxes for construction of roads and for schools, but that doesn't give you the right to drive 100 mph through a school zone. You have to have limits. There have to be rules.
Well, a lot of it just has to do with the psychological wiring of homo sapiens. We have to think that our actions are meaningful, that our victories are entirely our doing and that our failures are caused by bad luck. Failure to think this way will make you feel very very depressed.
So, in the case of these stock options scams, there's a lot of people that *know* it is a scam, but, if they're quick enough, they might profit as well from the clueless hordes that will buy the stock later on. My bet is that the largest stake of these stock buyers thinks along theses lines. People might try that a couple of time before they realize they loose every time - and by that time new clueless humans come along.
Then, there's that pitfall of familiarity. We tend to like things we already know. This is what advertising is based on. Show me 10 advertisements for 'Toothpaste Brand A' and none for 'Toothpaste Brand B' and when I'm in a shop, I will pick brand A (even if I very consciously know that that preference is based solely on advertising). A lot of people will think along the lines "It can't be that bad if they offer it to me this often - it must be the real thing" I once read an interview with a women that suffered severe dental problems after buying teeth whitener form a tell-sell channel, and she literally said "I thought: they advertise so much for it, it must be a good product".
And then there's just basic greed: "This offer is so good, I don't want to spoil it with disbelief."
And shame: "I can't ask Viagra to my doctor, this might be a rip off, but it might also be the right thing. I won't know until I try it".
And the-only-change: "They don't sell penis enlargment kits in my pharmacy, I know it is shady, but I can't get it anywhere else"
And the list goes on... We are o so great in fooling ourselves.
I HATE these stupid 'form letter' responses. They make the poster look like they know-it-all, and they preclude any REAL thought or discussion about the idea. That said, I have a simple, foolproof idea to help eliminate spam.
Email certification.
If you want to be able to send Certified Email (CE), you apply for Certification from the company that gives you internet connectivity. They check you out, and 'Certify' you as being a legitimate emailer (ie: not a spammer). Then, you generate a private/public key pair and give them the public one. In the headers of all your email, is their certification, and an encrypted header line that's createdusing your private key.
When email arrives at the recipients server (or this could be done at the client level, as well), the server sees the certification, and connects to the certifying server to get your public key. It attempts to decrypt the header line. If it does it marks the email as 'certified', if it cannot, it marks the email as 'uncertified', and the email client can be programmed to filter messages based on that.
Due to the public/private key cryptography, there can be no certified email spoofing. (Assuming the private keys are secure, the keys are of decent length, etc.) All emails are traceable back to the originating server. CORRECTION- all CERTIFIED emails are traceable. Anonymous email is still possible. People can still set up email servers for mailing lists without "having" to get them certified. And people can still receive non-certified mail.
If an email server sends out spam, the complaints go to it's certifier. They can drop the certification, deleting the public key from their server. When this happens, ALL the email from the spamming server is now 'uncertified', and gets handled accordingly by email clients. If nothing is done, complaints go to THEIR upstream, etc. Individuals and groups can keep their own blacklists, if they wish, and anyone can choose to filter emails according to those lists.
Now, I've looked over that 'form email' that people like to post to shoot down anti-spam ideas. And nothing applies to this idea. (If something seems to apply, it's because I either left out details, or explained something wrong.) This idea does NOT need to be universally adopted, nor does it need to be adopted by everyone all at once. It's primarily a way of reliably tracing (certified) emails back to their originating server. The anti-spam part comes later: if you receive certified spam, complain and get the server un-certified. If you receive un-certified spam... well, just have your email client dump all uncertified emails in the trash. (Not nessisarilly, you could just use it's un-certifedness as a factor in filtering your email.)
This idea does not require anything be changed with SMTP. It simply requires a second connection be made to the certifying server. Now, before you bitch about the extra bandwidth, I'd like to remind you that, once this idea catches on, spam will be greatly reduced. This reduction will MORE than make up for the slight increase in bandwidth created in querying the certifying servers. Also, the certifying servers can set time limits on when the certifications expire, and need to be re-downloaded (kind of like DHCP leases). A 'new' company that just applied for certification might have it's certificate set to expire almost instantly. This way, every email they send requires a download of the certificate. This allows the certificate to be pulled rapidly if they start spamming. After a month or two, it could be set to expire weekly or monthly.
To sum up: Email Certification is reliable way of tracing the certified emails back to their originating server. This allows spammers to be identified unequivocally, and have their certification pulled. Email servers are NOT required to be certified, and anonymous email is still possible. Email recipients can, if they choose, set up their client to send uncertified emails to the trash, or to handle them however they wish. White lists and black lists