Spam levels skyrocket in UK
13:09 Monday 25th November 2002
Matthew Broersma
One in eight UK emails is now junk, according to MessageLabs.
But things could be worse: in the US levels are more than twice as high. UK email users have seen a dramatic
rise in the amount of spam clogging their in-boxes during 2002, according to new figures released by email
security company MessageLabs.
One in every eight email messages in the UK currently contains spam, according
to MessageLabs' estimates - up from one in every 199 just last January. Judging by US trends, there is likely to be worse ahead: across the pond, one in three emails is an unsolicited bulk advertisement.
"Six to nine months ago, spam was seen as a minor annoyance or an inconvenience, but nowadays people are beginning to see that it is a serious productivity problem," said," said MessageLabs chief technical officer Mark Sunner.
He said that spammers methods for avoiding filtering tools have also been growing increasingly sophisticated, including polymorphic spams that change slightly to avoid static filters. "There's definitely an arms race between those sending spam and the filtering organisations," he said.
MessageLabs provides managed email services for customers around Europe, the US and Hong Kong, and the figures are tallied from its email processing engines. The company said it has, on average, stopped 45 spam messages a minute so far in 2002.
Spam is an increasingly thorny issue for businesses, with MessageLabs estimating that 10 percent of users' working day is spent dealing with unwanted messages. The new figures are likely to add fuel to the debate over what to do about junk email. Various legal remedies are under discussion, but in the mean time many ISPs and companies have turned to automatic spam filters. These, however, can keep legitimate mail from reaching its audience.
Besides losing productivity, spam has increasingly caused damage by distributing viruses or scams. MessageLabs said that the so-called "Nigerian scam", also called the "419 scam", was the fastest-growing threat of the year.
The scam messages typically request help in transferring a large amount of money out of Nigeria, and the victim is lured into contributing a sizeable sum in order to help the process along, expecting to meet the scammer in a hotel later on to receive their cut. The UK National Criminal Intelligence Service estimates that each day up to five Americans are waiting in London hotel lobbies for such fictional meetings.
"It is absolutely gobsmacking how many people are taken in by this," Sunner said. "But if you look at the scale of this, you can start to see how it works. Tens of millions of these messages are sent out, so even if only 0.1 percent respond, it's still a lot of people."
Email software makers have been forced to build more sophisticated spam filters into their products. Microsoft's Outlook and Apple's Mail application have recently added new filters.
MessageLabs' data comes a few weeks after research from several email companies found that spam could make up the majority of emails by the end of the year.
Some advertisers have recently begun bypassing email entirely and feeding pop-up messages directly onto the desktop via a feature in Windows.
September was the worst month in the UK for spam, with one in five emails counting as junk, MessageLabs said. The best month was February, where spam levels dipped to one in 251.
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FIRMS HIT INTERNET MISUSE
Thursday January 23, 2003
More UK workers are surfing the internet from home as bosses clamp down on personal computer use at work.
A survey for electronics group Amstrad found a quarter of those polled had installed internet access at home to avoid being monitored by managers.
"Bosses are beginning to realise how much time their employees are spending on personal emails and are really cracking down," said Amstrad's commercial director Simon Sugar.
Nearly a third of those polled claimed to know their bosses read their emails, while 39% said they would be disciplined if caught surfing the net outside their lunch hour.
But despite the risks, workers spend an average of nearly two and a half hours a day on personal emails and the internet, the survey found.
A recent report found email and internet abuse is the biggest cause of disciplinary action in the British workplace.
The study, by law firm KLegal and the magazine Personnel Today, found it accounted for more sackings than violence, dishonesty and health and safety breaches combined.
Bosses are increasingly cracking down to avoid damage to their company's image and possible lawsuits.
In July, computer and printer maker Hewlett-Packard suspended dozens of staff in the UK and Ireland during a probe into suspected email abuse.
Quoted from http://www.sky.com/skynews
© 2003 BSkyB
Quoted from Network World, Inc.
Copyright, 1994-2003 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISPs turn up the heat on spammers
By Scarlet Pruitt
IDG News Service, 02/20/03
Spammers beware: Major e-mail service providers are sick and tired of you clogging their networks, annoying their customers and eating up their revenue as they attempt to stop your officious ways.
"We are fed up with spam and we HATE it as much as you do!" AOL wrote in a message posted to its members this week.
In fact, AOL is so annoyed with spam that it announced the formation Thursday of a special anti-spam task force, as well as preparations to roll out new spam fighting tools and advocate for tougher laws to combat the unsolicited e-mail plague.
AOL's declaration of war comes on the heels of news that Microsoft is corralling even more suspected spammers to court. The software giant maker filed suit against unnamed defendants in a California court last week for allegedly harvesting the e-mail addresses of users of its Hotmail service for the purpose of spamming.
Furthermore, a Microsoft representative said this week that the company would be lodging even more suits against spammers soon.
And now AOL is also taking spammers to task, which is not surprising considering that the heavyweight ISP said that its filters are blocking 780 million pieces of junk mail a day from e-mail users' in-boxes.
"We are redirecting ourselves to the spam fight with purpose," said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham. The company is reporting to its members this week on its efforts to stop spam as feedback to its recently launched "Tell Us" campaign, Graham said.
"Fighting spam was far and away the top issue for our members," Graham said.
The company is taking a multifaceted approach to the issue, through the courts, lobbying for tough legislation and working with other ISPs.
"While there is no silver bullet we are taking a double-barrelled approach," Graham said.
The onslaught of spam, which some researchers predicated would overtake legitimate e-mail in users' in-boxes in coming years, has become a serious focus for e-mail users and service providers in recent months. In fact, the deluge even led to the first-ever spam filter conference held in Cambridge, Mass., last month.
While experts currently disagree on which solutions for stopping spam are best, they do agree that user pressure on ISPs is one of the most effective ways to turn up the heat on spammers. If the news from Microsoft and AOL this week are any indication, that appears to be true.
Quoted from Network World, Inc.
Copyright, 1994-2003 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.
Two sentenced in major e-mail spam scam
January 5, 2001
by James Evans
(IDG) -- Two Russian émigrés will serve more than 2 years in jail for their part in an e-mail spam scam that clogged U.S. ISPs with more than 50 million e-mails and defrauded victims of more than $250,000.
Steve Shklovskiy and Yan Shtok, both 23, were sentenced Dec. 27, 2000 for masterminding the e-mail scheme that took place in September of 1999 and wreaked havoc on a number of ISPs, said Christopher Johnson, senior litigation counsel for the organized crime strike force of the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles on Wednesday. A U.S. District Court judge ordered the two to pay restitution of $104,000 and serve 27 months in jail.
Shklovskiy and Shtok in September of 1999 with the use of some commercial software were able to harvest e-mail addresses and then send out more than 50 million e-mails through a FlashNet (a division of Prodigy Communications LP) e-mail account, Johnson said.
The two sent out e-mails that asked job seekers to pay $35 to learn how to make thousands of dollars by working out of their homes stuffing envelopes, he said. On one occasion, the pair spent 24 hours sending spam and on one other 26-hour period in mid-September 1999, he said. Many of the messages were targeted at colleges or markets where typically people are in need of work.
The job seekers were supposed to send the registration fee to a post office box in Los Angeles. If the recipient tried to reply to the e-mail, the job seeker would discover the e-mail address from bigbear.net, which is controlled by Mountain Telecom, was not active, Johnson said.
Mountain Telecom in Big Bear Lake, Calif., could not be reached for comment. But the ISP told prosecutors that the spam caused the company to receive more than 100,000 complaints and at one time it hired three full-time people to deal with them, Johnson said. Disgruntled users also may have caused Mountain Telecom's servers to shut down and impacted the Web service of some 500 companies using the ISP's network, he added.
U.S. Postal Service inspectors staked out the post office boxes during a five-week period, Johnson said. At the same time, postal service inspectors began deciphering the IP addresses of the spam and learned that Shtok had paid for the FlashNet e-mail account with a credit card, Johnson said.
Ultimately, four men were arrested for their roles in the scam in November 1999. The two other men pleaded guilty to lesser charges and in July 2000 received 3 years probation, Johnson said.
Search warrants were issued and used to search the homes of Shklovskiy and Shtok. Prosecutors learned the two had ties to Russian organized crime. Prosecutors also discovered evidence of insurance and medical fraud, Johnson said. It was eventually determined that the two defrauded victims out of between $250,000 and $300,000. None of the money was ever recovered, Johnson said.
Prior to the sending of the 50 million e-mails in September 1999, for more than a year the men were also involved in spamming tens of thousands of people with similar e-mails, Johnson said. These spam attacks impacted ISPs like AOL) AT&T's Worldnet and MindSpring, Johnson said.
If collected, most of the restitution money, about $100,000, will go to Mountain Telecom for lost revenue dealing with the spam and the complaints it generated. The remainder will go to fraud victims who were identified, Johnson said.
New technology provided a quick avenue for a scam that with traditional mail would have cost millions of dollars, Johnson said.
"To do the same fraud with real mail, it would cost $16.5 million in postage to send out the same volume," he said. "The Internet has provided a new avenue for these crooks."
Quoted from Network World, Inc.
Copyright, 1994-2003 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.
Why one spam could cost $50
By Maggie Shiels in San Francisco
A US law firm has become the hero of the common people for its decision to take on the spam merchants who wage guerrilla warfare on our e-mail inboxes, offering everything from sex to cars and easy money to psychic readings.
The San Francisco office of Morrison and Foerster, also known as MoFo, is one of the first outfits in the United States to take on spammers who send out unsolicited commercial e-mail.
For six months the company logged at least 6,500 spams which were sent to its staff on a daily basis.
Michael Jacobs, who is a partner at MoFo and chairs its technology committee, says e-mail is "mission-critical" to his firm.
"We live on e-mail. We use it to communicate with our clients. We use it for internal communications. We are trying to work very quickly and efficiently and spam was degrading our ability to do that."
In its fight, MoFo is suing a Silicon Valley e-mail marketing firm called Etracks. Mr Jacobs says while it wasn't the only company sending unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), it was one of the biggest offenders and more importantly it's based in California.
Damages claim
In the US there is no blanket federal law governing junk e-mail and the 20 states which have introduced their own laws can only enforce them within their borders. No one has been prosecuted under California's four-year-old statute.
In its suit, MoFo says Etracks broke California's anti-spam laws by sending unwanted e-mail and advertising a range of items without the required advertising label and using the company's mail server to distribute the e-mails.
MoFo also claims a legally mandated free phone number or valid return e-mail service to request removal from the marketer's list was missing.
The suit, filed in San Francisco's Superior Court, asks for damages of $50 (£35) for each e-mail received with a maximum daily amount of $25,000, the limit set by law.
Preference service
The lawyers for Etracks did not return calls to BBC News Online but its attorney Kenneth Wilson told the San Francisco Chronicle that Etracks only uses e-mail lists provided by clients who assert the recipients have opted to receive its messages or have an existing relationship.
On its website Etracks says it is a member of the Direct Marketing Association, an 85-year-old organisation which sets out ethical guidelines to its 5,000 members on best practice.
The organisation distances itself from spamming.
"No DMA member can send spam and the DMA agrees that people should be able to ask to get off mailing lists and stay off," says DMA's vice president of ethics and consumer affairs, Pat Faley.
To that end the DMA has designed the "e-mail preference service" where anyone can submit their e-mail address to be removed from all members' lists, says Ms Faley.
The problem, she says, is that it has no control over anyone who is not a member of DMA.
While Etracks clearly carries the DMA logo on its website, Ms Faley says there's no record of the company's membership either past or present. The matter has been referred to its legal department.
State law
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, or CAUCE, says this case highlights the need for a national approach to a problem that is seriously undermining business.
Spokesman Ray Everett-Church, who helped draft California's anti-spam laws, says e-mail is a "critical part of the world economy today".
"If you cause people to think twice about engaging in some business transaction over e-mail for fear it will cause more spam you are putting a damper on the growth of what is an incredible global commerce and communications medium."
A 2001 survey by the European Commission estimates that spam costs consumers an estimated $8.8bn a year worldwide just in connection costs.
Internet research company Jupiter Media Metrix predicts consumers will receive about 206 billion junk e-mailings by 2006 - an average of 1,400 per person. Each piece of spam is said to cost $1 in lost productivity.
At MoFo, the suit has received unprecedented public backing. The level of sentiment expressed in one e-mail is indicative of the kinds of messages it has been getting.
It reads: "I hate spam as much as the next guy. Take these jerks for everything they've got. You are pinch hitting for all of us. I love you."
Mr Jacobs says it's unusual for a law firm to be loved by the public and it's great.
"I have been practising for over 15 years and I have never done anything as a lawyer that has been this popular."
Quoted from BBC News (C) MMIII 
Tech firm in e-mail abuse crackdown
Wednesday, 17 July, 2002
Hewlett Packard, the US computer giant, has sacked two members of its UK staff and suspended 150 others for alleged e-mail abuse.
The numbers involved suggests that this is one of the biggest cases of its kind so far.
Two employees in the company's Scotland office were dismissed while staff have been suspended elsewhere in the UK and in Ireland.
"HP can confirm that this involves the viewing and sharing of unauthorised and inappropriate material," a statement from HP said.
Not criminal
More and more firms have been cracking down on employees' use of e-mail to send pornography and tasteless jokes.
So far, Hewlett Packard considers the matter a violation of company rules, but not a criminal matter.
The 150 staff on suspension are made up of 60 permanent staff and 90 contract staff and their fate will be determined following a company investigation.
The issue of e-mail abuse has become one of increasing concern for employers.
Across the world
The latest generation of e-mail scanners allows employers to sift workers' correspondence for words deemed unsuitable.
The most high profile case of "e-mail abuse" involved a lawyer at London law firm Norton Rose.
Bradley Chait forwarded copies of a smutty e-mail sent to him by his girlfriend.
Within hours it had spread from Norton Rose to other London law firms before making its way across the world as far as New Zealand.
Quoted from BBC News (C) MMIII
Companies flock to internet filtering
Wednesday, 17 July, 2002
The business of corporate cyber snooping is getting ever more serious. Imagine the following scenarios:
Web-based e-mail services, such as hotmail.com or aol.com are mysteriously unavailable.
The Big Brother webcam triggers an alarm bell with your IT Manager who sits downstairs and could report you to the company bigwig.
Research reveals:
Nine out of ten employees using the internet at work think that it is addictive
The unobtrusive BBC News Online cricket scorecard that sits quietly in the corner of your screen is blank, even though the match has already begun.
And online share trading - a sackable offence according to your contract - is immediately visible to your line manager.
Your are allowed two breaks each day when your machine magically drops its regulatory control and releases you into online freedom - for ten minutes at a time. Just how much more work would get done?
Money down the drain
Most IT managers and corporate internet users are convinced that monitoring and filtering procedures are an absolute necessity.
This may not surprise too many people, with the dangers of online porn or race-hate sites widely acknowledged.
But corporate attention is now turning away from morality issues and homing in on using internet filters to increase profitability.
White collar employers are increasingly alarmed at just how much time is wasted surfing the internet each day.
Censoring power
And the result is a booming internet filtering industry.
Companies such as the UK's SurfControl say the most common reason for businesses to use filtering software is to increase productivity of staff.
Using the internet at work:
- 52% booking holidays
- 41% research a hobby
- 28% Online shopping
- 27% Sport
And a spate of recent research has confirmed the worst fears of suspicious employers.
The majority of online shopping, personal e-mailing, and house-buying all take place during the nine-to-five working day.
If 1,000 workers each spent an hour a day on the internet, that would cost an average company about $35m a year.
To add insult to injury, job hunting was amongst the most enticing activity for an extended period of cyber slacking.
By way of an excuse, nine out of ten employees said that that the internet was addictive in a recent survey.
Quoted from BBC News (C) MMIII
The most annoying spam of 2002
Friday, 24 January, 2003
Every person on the net has one thing in common. They all hate spam.
Anyone who has an e-mail account will have received these unsolicited commercial messages that offer you things you do not want, at prices you will not pay, from companies you will never call.
2002 was a bumper year for these messages and now 30% of all mail flying around the net is thought to be spam.
Filtering firm Surf Control has compiled a list of the top 10 most annoying spam messages sent across the net in the last 12 months.
Message overload
Unsurprisingly, top of the list were messages with a sexual theme.
The most annoying spam purported to pass on to people free passwords for sex sites that usually levy a charge to look beyond the front page.
Next on the list was a pharmaceutical service offering people the sex drug Viagra.
Also on the list of most annoying spam messages were those asking people to help get money out of various African nations.
Spam top 10
- Free adult site passwords
- Low price drugs (Viagra)
- Refinance your mortgage
- Nigerian confidential money transfer
- Tiny remote control car
- Best online casino
- #1 Pasta pot
- Get out of credit card debt
- Meet singles in your area
- Copy DVDs in one click
These 419 scams as they are called are entirely bogus but regularly catch out gullible net users who let their greed overwhelm their common sense.
Costly business
Surf Control estimates that spam costs businesses around the world about $9billion a year to deal with.
This estimate includes the time it takes people to delete the messages, the cost of buying larger mail servers and storage systems to cope with in-boxes flooded with the messages and the cost of having staff unclog networks overloaded by spam.
There is little sign of an end to unsolicited mail. Last year, one in 12 e-mails passing through MessageLabs' filter system was identified as spam. The e-mail filtering company has warned of a dramatic rise in the amount of spam clogging in-boxes. It says the amount of spam will exceed normal e-mails by around July.
Quoted from BBC News (C) MMIII
Spammers are watching you, law firm warns
by Daniel Thomas
Thursday 13 February 2003
More than eight out of ten spam e-mails contain covert tracking codes that allow the senders to record and log recipients’ e-mail addresses as soon as the message is opened, new research has found.
Many of these unwanted messages would be illegal under regulations such as the Data Protection Act, said Shelagh Gaskill, partner at law firm Masons, which commissioned the research.
Much of what [the spammers] are promoting is illegal anyway, so they are not going to take much notice of laws from the UK, EU or anywhere else,” she said.
It is important that there are laws against pure spam it must be deterred, but it is also vital to protect the rights of companies to market their products legitimately. The best way to deal with spam is not in court, it has to be found in technology.”
The research, conducted by network security firm iomart on behalf of Masons, found that 83% of messages sent over a two-week period to a specially created account were HTML e-mails with hidden tracking codes.
After a two-week period, the volume of spam received on these accounts virtually doubled.
Iain Richardson, software developer with iomart, said the majority of spam is evident from the subject header and should be deleted immediately. But, he warned, spammers are becoming more sophisticated so users should be on guard.
Popular software, such as Microsoft Outlook or Express, lets the user read a section of the e-mail in the preview window before opening the e-mail,” Richardson said.
Be warned that viewing a preview pane will activate the hidden tracker code, so do not use it if you want to minimise spam.”
War-Related Spam Skyrocketed Following America's Entry Into Iraq
SCOTTS VALLEY, CA. (April 7, 2003) - With the onset of war with Iraq, e-mail from people marketing war-related merchandise has become the fastest growing new type of spam, according to SurfControl, the world's number one Web and e-mail filtering company.
The company's global research team reported at the end of March that war-related spam rose, in less than a month, from an insignificant number to nearly 10 percent of all spam collected and monitored for SurfControl's anti-spam database. Most of the war-related spam began to appear in mid-March, using patriotism and fear to sell everything from lapel pins to gas masks.
"The extremely rapid growth in this new form of spam points to the need for a comprehensive spam filter that incorporates a spam signature database to allow network administrators to quickly screen the sudden influx of any new variety of spam," said Paris Trudeau, product marketing manager. "SurfControl's technology relies on multiple layers of spam-detection, including artificial intelligence technology, Boolean logic, and a vast spam signature database. So, we could help identify and classify spam immediately and filter out war spam for most companies before it ever reached end users."
Among the most frequent war-related spam e-mails were:
- American Car Flags to Support our Troops
- Celebrate American Courage: Take 4 History Books for $1 Each!
- Defenders of Freedom U.S. Coin
- Discover Platinum American Flag Card
- Honor our Military with Exclusive Collectibles
- Show Your Pride (T-shirts)
- Show your support with a US Lapel Pin!
- Support our Troops (T-shirts)
- Terrorist Threat, Please Read! (Water filtration system)
- Israeli Gas Masks in Stock for a Limited Time!
The spam e-mails selling gas masks, while not as frequent as many of the others, illustrates the rapid growth in war spam. Gas mask spam rose from zero in early February to 216 variations of gas mask spam by March. The list of most common spam did not include unsolicited e-mail related to the war that was not designed to sell merchandise, such as "Join President Bush in Thanking our Troops," a request for letters and care packages to be sent to U.S. troops that claimed it had been paid for by the Republican National Committee. Such junk e-mail was as ubiquitous in March as spam.
"Spam is already a huge problem, but companies worldwide are coming to realize it is only part of the problem," Trudeau says. "Junk mail can be just as much of a nuisance to an enterprise as spam. And all Internet content you read, send and receive carries a risk. Companies need to be vigilant in managing e-mail to stop spam, junk, e-mail borne viruses and other risks that plague businesses."
Organizations should consider layering protection. SurfControl E-mail Filter 4.5, for example, combines strong anti-spam defense, anti-virus technology and advanced e-mail auditing and risk assessment to protect against the ever-increasing variety of e-mail security risks.
