In Depth

Spam: Inbox Patrol

Is there a white knight solution to spam?

By Simson Garfinkel

February 01, 2003 — CSO — E-mail is the Internet's killer app. Yet the future of e-mail is in serious jeopardy by the ever-increasing torrent of unwanted e-mail that fills our inboxes and clogs our mail servers.

The statistics are frightening. According to Brightmail, an antispam company, 40 percent of all e-mail is now spam, and nearly 15 percent of all spam is pornographic, up from 5 percent last year. Pornographic spam is an affront to many Internet users, creating a hostile workplace and opening employers to the threat of litigation.

Brightmail operates a "probe network" built from old e-mail addresses at some of the world's largest (and smallest) ISPs. Whenever lots of mailboxes receive messages that are similar, the messages are sent to Brightmail's operations center, where human beings look at the messages and determine if they are spam. In November 2002, Brightmail's experts uncovered 5.5 million spam "attacks," each consisting of between several thousand and several million messages.

Many ISPs have strict policies against spamming. If spam is sent out from your computer, your Internet connection can be terminated without notice or other warnings. Imagine my astonishment in late November when I discovered that more than 100,000 spam messages had been sent to Hotmail from the network connection in my own basement. Here's what happened.

When a friend of mine lost his Web-hosting facility, I agreed to let him put a Windows 2000 e-commerce site in my basement, using one of my unused IP addresses. One day, he removed his computer's host-based firewall because it was making the SQL Server crash. That night, a piece of software on his computer opened up a connection to Hotmail, created a new account, and started using it to spam Yahoo and AOL subscribers with advertisements for penis enlargement. The attack continued for precisely one hour, then shut off. It repeated with a new Hotmail account five hours later.

My friend has antivirus software running on his Windows system, but neither he nor it found the hostile code. In the end, his only recourse was to reinstall the host-based firewall and deal with the occasional crashes.

ISPs feel compelled to take such drastic actions with spammers because legal approaches have largely failed, and spammers are hurting ISPs where it countsin the checkbook. Spammers are forcing ISPs to buy more computers to handle the e-mail load, to develop and deploy technology to shield customers from spam, and to hire more employees to deal with the complaints. And if ISPs don't immediately kill the accounts of suspected spammers, they risk being put on antispam blacklists.

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