Bill Gates was wildly optimistic when he said in 2004 that the problem of spam would be “solved” by 2006. The volume of junk e-mail transmitted worldwide is still enormous. But a remarkable trend is underfoot, according to Brad Taylor, a staff software engineer at Google: The number of spam attempts — that is, the number of junk messages sent out by spammers — is flat, and may even be declining for the first time in years.
Google won’t disclose numbers, but the company says that spam attempts, as a percentage of e-mail that’s transmitted through its Gmail system, have waned over the last year. That could indicate that some spammers have gotten discouraged and have stopped trying to get through Google’s spam filters.
Other experts disagree with Google, pointing out that overall spam attempts continue to rise. By most estimates, tens of billions of spam messages are sent daily. Yet for most users, the amount of spam arriving in their inboxes has remained relatively flat, thanks to improved filtering.
Brad Taylor is on the front lines of the war on spam. He has served as the chief watchdog of Google’s spam filter since 2004, when Gmail first launched. His history with spam goes back much further, though: He’s been fascinated with it since 1994, when he received his first spam e-mail at a work account. Before he joined Google, he worked at an anti-spam startup.
Taylor denies he’s obsessed with junk mail, but his actions speak otherwise: For his own amusement, he Googles the gobbledygook at the bottom of spam messages to see where the text comes from. (Some are from Harry Potter books, he says. He also found one that was an English translation of a Russian science-fiction novel).
“It’s fun,” he says of catching spammers. “Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, wow, that guy’s really clever.’”
The chase may be exciting, but Taylor’s real dream is to return e-mail to the “pristine experience it used to be.”
Chenxi Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research, scoffs at the idea that spam attempts could be on the decline.
“I’m seeing that the overall trend is up,” Wang says. “We’re not seeing a drastic increase, though. And we’re also seeing an increase of targeted spam instead of blanket spam that hits everybody in a large population. Today, for instance, you see spam messages on saving (on) prescription drugs targeted to seniors.”
For its part, Yahoo, too, says the overall amount of spam transmitted is on the rise, but the percentage of spam that reaches its users’ inboxes is down. (Yahoo would not disclose specific numbers.)
Regardless of the overall spam attempts, David Daniels, vice president of Jupiter Research, predicts the number of spam messages that actually reach a typical inbox will remain roughly flat over the next three years. And for most people, that’s what really matters.
“We’re forecasting that the number of spam messages that annually reach the average inbox will hit 4,351 in 2007. For 2010, we think that number will essentially be flat at 4,403. The growth will be very, very small,” Daniels says.
There are a couple of reasons for the lack of growth in spam deliveries. For one, e-mail providers like Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s Hotmail use sophisticated filtering algorithms that are constantly updated based on spam reports from individual users. Google says it can delete all instances of a single spam message across the Gmail network in seconds.
New anti-spam technologies are also always under development, and there are already countless anti-spam services and technologies available to consumers, including disposable e-mail addresses.
It’s by no means a perfect system, though. And spammers are, if nothing else, persistent.
In a bizarre twist, Daniels thinks that instead of receiving spam offers from penny-stock pushers, mailboxes will increasingly be filled with marketing messages that we choose to receive, such as promotional e-mails from a favorite clothing store or a bank. He thinks the average number of messages from marketers that individuals receive annually will grow from 2,715 in 2007 to 3,335 in 2010.
“We expect people to spend as much time on e-mail as they have, but we think people will receive more e-mail from legitimate marketers. So there will be more competition to get consumers’ attention in the inbox, but it will be more like competition between The Gap and J.C. Penney as opposed to The Gap and a Viagra salesman.”
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As anti-spam tools and e-mail users become more sophisticated, spammers are turning to new mediums to get their unwelcome messages through filters and into inboxes. One of the more recent developments is spam with attached MP3 files. One security software vendor, MXSweep, is reporting that MP3 spam now accounts for between 7 and 10 percent of all spam being sent.
The files are given innocuous-sounding names like elvis.mp3, oursong.mp3, smashingpumpkins.mp3, or coolringtone.mp3. The payload is disappointing: a voice recording touting the virtues of some corporate stock; in other words, it’s pump-and-dump stock spam in a new format. It’s also a dumb idea. The overlap of those gullible enough to click on MP3 files of unknown provenance and those willing and able to invest in a stock that they’ve never heard of is certainly minute. It’s bound to be more of an annoyance than anything else and seems unlikely to result in the desired stock purchases.
Attachment spam can be easily filtered, but the sheer size of the messages can cause headaches. The MP3 files currently used run from 85KB to 147KB, according to MXSweep. “Although these emails now account for 8 percent of current traffic they consume up to 55 percent of e-mail bandwidth use, which in business terms is a huge additional cost,” said Danny Jenkins, CTO and founder of MXSweep.
So far, security researchers haven’t identified any malicious payloads in any of the MP3 stock spam messages, so the biggest headache will be configuring spam filters to stop the MP3 message from hitting inboxes. That should be fairly easy for corporate IT departments who aren’t already stopping e-mails with audio attachments. If your e-mail client supports rules-based filtering, simply set it to flag and delete messages with MP3 attachments.
The Federal Trade Commission believes legislation such as the CAN-SPAM Act and some high-profile convictions are making a difference, but spammers have responded by moving more of their operations offshore, going deeper underground, and coming up with new means of getting their unwelcome messages into inboxes.
Naturally, once countermeasures against MP3 spam are widely in place, spammers will move on to another payload. That’s why we’re facing MP3 spam now: anti-spam tools have become adept at dealing with image spam (e.g., GIF and JPEG images attached to a message), PDF spam, and Excel spam. Just a few months ago, PDF spam accounted for nearly 20 percent of all image spam; that number has since plummeted to under 1 percent, according to e-mail security company Proofpoint. Image-based spam has also plummeted to 2.23 percent of all messages as of the end of September.
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E-mail scams seek to separate people from their money by promising a share of unclaimed lottery riches, bounty from a dead fugitive, work-at-home schemes and other enticements.
But an Ocean County man recently got an e-mail with a darker twist: Gimme your money, and I’ll cancel the contract someone put out to kill you.
Harry E. Whitworth, 72, of the Whiting section of Manchester Township, opened his e-mail Tuesday to find a curious screed supposedly from a man named Eddy.
“I know that this may sound very surprising to you but it’s the situation,” the e-mail began. “I have been paid some ransom in advance to terminate you with some reasons listed to me by my employer.”
The price to call off the hit: $8,000 — half of which is to be paid up front as a sign of good faith. Sort of.
The e-mail also warned him not to tell friends or relatives, since they might be part of the plot to kill, too.
“I kind of knew it was a scam,” said Whitworth, a retired accountant who lives with his wife in a senior citizen development. “The prosecutor’s office came over to see me and asked if I had been involved in anything in the past that might have caused this to happen.”
Whitworth did an Internet research that found someone has been running a similar scam in Arizona, with nearly identical e-mails full of typographical errors and misspellings.
The e-mailer promises to send the recipient a videotape of “his employer” putting out the contract on the recipient’s life.
But there were no instructions on how to comply with the demand for cash, and no timetable on when it had to be paid.
Capt. Michael Mohel, a spokesman for the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, said the case remains under investigation but declined further comment.
The FBI received 115 complaints of similar e-mails reaching people across the country in less than a month last winter, according to its website. The e-mails vary only in the amount of money demanded, ranging as high as $80,000.
Some even incorporate personal information about the recipient that is widely available from online databases, the FBI said.
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