kring
Asst Cook & Bottle Washer
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2003-05-07-coverside-usat_x.htm
USAToday also reported this at the same time:
Spam thrives despite effort to screen it out
By Jon Swartz and Paul Davidson, USA TODAY
Stephen Smith can't escape spam. The junk e-mails, about 300 a day, show up on his home PC. His work PC. His cell phone. Smith, 31, has set up at least six e-mail accounts to outrun spammers.
He has tried spam-fighting software. He and his wife, expecting their first child, are already talking about how they'll protect her from pornographic spam.
They "are relentless," says Smith, the e-mail administrator for a diet supplements firm in Phoenix .
Smith isn't the only one who wants to slam spam. A backlash against unsolicited commercial e-mail is reaching a crescendo.
Corporate spending against spam is skyrocketing. The Internet companies that deliver e-mail to tens of millions have started attacking spammers in more aggressive ways. A flurry of legislation is in the works. Virginia recently passed the nation's harshest anti-spam law.
And consumers are increasingly quitting e-mail services or turning off cell phones to escape spam.
But though spam may be curbed, it will be a long, tough fight, experts say. Spammers routinely change tactics and locations, making them hard to stop. Many make the valid claim that spam is a legitimate marketing tool so legislating what's spam and what's free speech is hard. And spammers are extending their reach, from PCs to instant messaging to cell phones.
"Get over it: Spam is here to stay," says Doug Wood, a lawyer specializing in online advertising.
More than 2 trillion pieces of junk e-mail are expected to flood the Internet in 2003 100 times the amount of mail delivered by the U.S. Postal Service last year.
As almost everyone with a computer knows, spam comes in the form of ads for sexually explicit products, mortgage rates and Nigerian charities, straining consumer and corporate e-mail services.
Spam got so bad last year at law firm Allen Matkins in Los Angeles that employees turned off wireless devices. "It muted the purpose of carrying a device," says Frank Gillman, director of technology.
"It's an epidemic," says Vance Nakamoto, vice president of operations at Terra Lycos, an Internet service provider, or ISP.
How they find you
How do spammers find you? Their robots scour chat rooms, newsgroups and other Web sites for e-mail addresses.
They use computers to randomly guess at addresses within a domain, such as aol.com, until they hit on valid ones. And they buy lists: up to 1 million e-mail addresses for only $25.
America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft won't say how much they spend on spam defenses. But BellSouth's Internet service provider group says it shells out $3 to $5 a year per customer to combat spam. Larger companies with corporate networks typically spend $1 to $2 per user each month to combat spam, technology managers say. For Cypress Semiconductor, with 3,000 e-mail users, that adds up to about $33,500 a year, with discounts plus $69,000 more in software.
One of the latest spam tactics is dubbed spoofing. That's where a spammer usurps the name of a legitimate business, for instance, to give the impression that it sent the e-mail. Companies have few options but to sue the spoofers, a time-consuming process because the spammers are difficult to track down.
Fighting on several fronts
Spam "is becoming as big a problem as computer viruses and worms," says Dennis Bell, director of technical operations at Cypress in San Jose, Calif. "What gets you is the sheer volume and its interference with people's work."
It's no surprise, then, that a spam-slamming nation is fighting on several fronts to put a lid on junk e-mail via:
Technology.Anti-spam technology usually comes in the form of software filters, which employ different techniques to weed out unwanted e-mail.
There are blacklists, which eliminate messages originating from a list of spam addresses. Heuristic models look for patterns in the e-mail's body and header that indicate spam. Some solutions use voting systems where users decide what qualifies as spam. Other systems reject e-mail with suspicious sender addresses and subject headers.
Brightmail, the biggest anti-spam software company, runs a "probe network" made up of more than 1 million e-mail addresses culled from businesses and ISPs. Whenever large numbers of mailboxes at a company receive similar messages, for example, the cyberequivalent of a fingerprint of those messages is sent to Brightmail, where technicians check it out. Brightmail experts in March uncovered 6.7 million "spam attacks," each containing thousands to millions of messages.
Spam "has forced us to buy five times as much hardware as we had two years ago," says Alexis Rosen, CEO of Panix. The New York-based ISP, with 5,000 subscribers, estimates spam-related costs will reduce his company's net income 12% to 15% this year.
EarthLink, the nation's third-largest Internet service provider with 5 million subscribers, this month is testing a "permission-based" system, which is optional to users. After someone sends an e-mail to an EarthLink subscriber, the sender gets back a message asking him to verify his identity. If he does, the e-mail goes through. If not, it is blocked. The system would recognize future messages from the same sender, so friends, for example, don't have to keep verifying their identities.
Quitting or switching ISPs. Some consumers, disgusted with the constant influx of spam, are taking their business elsewhere.
A recent CNN/USA TODAY/Gallup poll found 13% of 448 e-mail users who said they got a lot of spam quit an e-mail service because of spam in the past year. An additional 24% considered quitting.
Phillip Harris, 42, of Fayetteville, N.C., is so fed up with spam on AOL, the biggest ISP and spam magnet, that he's leaving the service after six years to join a broadband service. About 40 of his 45 or so daily e-mails are spam, many pitching sexual products that his two young sons see. "It's really getting out of hand," he says.
Legal onslaughts. AOL which blocks almost 2.4 billion spam e-mails a day, or about 80% of its inbound mail last month filed lawsuits against more than a dozen spammers, saying they violated its anti-bulk e-mail policy. It was AOL's biggest crackdown ever on spam, based on the volume generated by the defendants. EarthLink and Microsoft have also stepped up legal action against alleged spammers.
The Virginia law signed April 29 makes it a felony to send large volumes of spam with fraudulent return addresses to e-mail servers based in the state. It's punishable by up to five years in prison, and authorities can seize profits and computer equipment connected with the spamming.
From SPAM to spam
It started 25 years ago with the first official spam sent by Digital Equipment marketing manager Gary Thuerk. He sent a mass mailing of 397 e-mails pitching technology on the Internet's predecessor, Arpanet.
"There was negative reaction," he says, chuckling. "But, on the other hand, a number of people contacted us for information."
When millions of Americans went online in the mid-1990s, the mass mailings mushroomed. Annoyed tech geeks dubbed it spam.
Their inspiration?
A Monty Python skit about a restaurant that serves only processed meat. In the sketch, a group of Vikings loudly sing, "Spam, spam, spam, spam," drowning out other conversations in the same manner e-mail spam disrupts online communication.
Hormel Foods, which has made canned meat called SPAM since 1937 and whom Monty Python parodied good-naturedly says it does not object to the use of the word "spam" as long as its product is distinguished as SPAM, in uppercase letters.
After the growth of spam has been the growth of anti-spam tools. But anti-spammers compare junk e-mailers with spray-resistant insects: Once you curb them with one solution, another, stronger strain surfaces. "It's a technology war. They tweak this, we tweak that," says e-mail marketer Laura Betterly, who sends 2 million to 4 million e-mails a day.
If filters block e-mail including telltale words such as "free" or "sex," spammers take those words out. They insert numbers and letters randomly to disguise phrases such as "free home mortgage" a classic spam.
To avoid the impression that they're cold-spamming, they use such phrases as "hey there" so victims think they know the sender.
To further elude filters, they're constantly forging their return e-mail or routing addresses and bouncing their messages off unsuspecting computers.
Spam "will always be a problem because it is cheap and effective," says analyst Sonia Arrison of think tank Pacific Research Institute.
Betterly, 42, launched her e-mail marketing business in her Dunedin, Fla., kitchen for just $15,000 in August and broke even within three months. She rejects the "spammer" label, saying she obtains lists of customers who have opted to receive products.
Hawking computers, software and other products for her small-business clients, it costs well under a penny to send an e-mail.
"Who can afford print, billboards or being on TV?" she asks.
Banning spam
Consumer advocates say only a ban on spam will curb it.
That's because most consumers don't read opt-out provisions when they buy online goods and services, says Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters. That makes their e-mail addresses vulnerable to marketers. What's more, U.S. laws won't be enforceable against the growing onslaught of spam from abroad, experts say. Then there's the task of defining spam. What one person might call spam, another might consider good information. Even at a recent Federal Trade Commission "spam summit," few could agree on what spam is.
Most company anti-spam filters catch 50% to 80% of spam, experts say. If filters get tighter, say to flag sex-related words, some legitimate e-mail could be deleted. "You could unwittingly kill e-mail about the Virgin Islands," says Brightmail CEO Enrique Salem. "Then you have a situation where employees are being deprived of e-mail they want. It's a delicate balance."
Contributing: Jim Hopkins
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-05-07-spam-cover_x.htm
