SPAM and the future
Feature from: DOMinion POST, CHRISTCHURCH PRESS & WAIKATO TIMES- MARCH 2007
If you are like most people in business, your morning ritual comprises of opening up your email and invariably sifting through piles of spam email - touting everything from the latest stock options and start-up opportunities in countries you have never heard of to pharmaceuticals not readily available over the counter.
As an IT account manager, one question business owners frequently ask me is why people spam. To cut a long story short, there is a lot of money to be made, both legally and illegally.
Although accurate figures are hard to pin down, spam has increased astronomically since email became the standard medium for business communication. In 2003, spam made up around 43% of all email sent and by early 2007 this had increased to a staggering 92%. This means that for every legitimate email you receive, there are nine others addressed personally to you that are spam!
So where do they make their money? Surprisingly, it is not from sales. Fraud, for example, is one common way spammers make their money; be it by stealing credit card details, or the infamous “Nigerian lotteries”. Although a lot less prolific than it was five to ten years ago this type of spam is still out there.
Recently, spammers have begun to use more legal methods such as ad impressions - the amount of times their site or sites linked to their site are clicked - hence the advent of those annoying pop-ups!
Other schemes have developed the use of ‘bots’ -computers that have been infiltrated by Trojans (a piece of hidden software downloaded from the internet or email), which usually link into a central spam server. Each of these bots is capable of sending upward of one million emails per day from their hosts and it is estimated that bot numbers worldwide increase by 250 000 per day! Amazingly, these Trojans may actually clean your computer of all viruses then reconfigure your computer to run at optimum speed before installing themselves, ensuring your computer is the perfect host.
As quick as spam filters get smarter, so do spammers in what has become a perpetual arms race that the spammers are leading.
Take 2006 for example, which saw the emergence of the imbedded image spam and the “pump and dump”. With image embedded spam, the entire spam email is configured and sent as an image, meaning that spam filters cannot recognise individual words, phrases or sites and let the email through. Pump and dump involves the hyping of listed stock owned by the spam entities. As more people buy, the stock rises and once prices hit a certain level, the spammers sell all stock and the price tumbles.
Calculating the actual cost of spam to business owners is an interesting task and like so many other areas of IT expenditure, many factors have to be taken into consideration. However, here is my rough estimate. Imagine a company with 20 staff earning on average $45,000 per annum, and they all receive around 20 spam per day. Taking into account time costs (reading and deleting spam), the storage costs (the size of each spam email), management costs (ISP traffic) and any downtime costs (such as viruses and Trojans directly from spam); the cost is about $7750pa
Obviously these factors are variable, but this example does illustrate the price of spam. Total estimated cost worldwide to businesses is a mind boggling $US two billion each year… and rising!
So what steps can businesses take to combat spam? Unfortunately, there are not that many. Like most IT services, you get what you pay for. Hosted solutions can be expensive, but in terms of security levels, spam filtration, virus protection and functionality there is no comparison.
Depending on the size of the organization there is also the potential to invest in dedicated spam hardware or software solutions, for which the price of an effective one starts at $US 10,000.
The final word? Unfortunately spam will continue to increase and it may just be part of your morning ritual for some time to come.
Patrick Kershaw is a Business Partner with Horizon Pacific, a nationwide technology support provider specialising in assisting SME’s with all their technology requirements. For further information, go to www.horizonpacific.com