A decade of Spam

BANGALORE: Spam celebrated its tenth birthday on 5th of March, this year. It all started with what seemed a ‘mild’ message that was posted to a Usenet newsgroup by Canter and Siegel, a law firm, to advertise their services for the U.S. Green Card Lottery. This left many appalled, as rules to maintain order in cyberspace were breached. Since there was no action against the law firm that continued with spamming, others soon followed suite.

Badly hit by spam, netters did not feel newsgroups were useful anymore and so individual email addresses became the spam-target. Initially the effort of putting big lists together was enormous compared to the small response rate. For spammers, the growing popularity of web and natural tendency of enthusiastic users to include email contact details on their sites, made address harvesting easier, informs web services firm Netcraft, in a online report.

New generation of spamming is seeing attacks of infectious worms- such as SoBig and MyDoom that can bring down web sites through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Companies and individual users have been so badly effected by spam that they are forced to rethink about usefulness of emailing and are also looking at alienating from it, all together, according to Netcraft.

Security experts are talking about various methods to stop spam like technical fixes to SMTP protocol, email authentication, client side filtering, Internet gateway products to name a few. But it is hard not to wish that some of the ingenuity and urgency now finally being shown had been brought to bear on those fledgling spam messages all those years ago.

CIOL Bureau