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Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.[citation needed]
Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.[citation needed]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Spamming in different media
o 1.1 Instant Messaging and Chat Room spam
o 1.2 Chat spam
o 1.3 Newsgroup spam and forum spam
o 1.4 Mobile phone spam
o 1.5 Online game messaging spam
o 1.6 Spam targeting search engines (spamdexing)
o 1.7 Blog, wiki, and guestbook spam
o 1.8 Spam targeting video sharing sites
* 2 Noncommercial spam
o 2.1 Hobbit spam
o 2.2 Spam as denial of service
o 2.3 In gaming
* 3 History
* 4 Costs of spam
o 4.1 General costs of spam
* 5 In Crime
* 6 Political issues
* 7 Court cases
o 7.1 United States
o 7.2 United Kingdom
* 8 References
* 9 Newsgroups
* 10 See also
* 11 External links
[edit] Spamming in different media
[edit] Instant Messaging and Chat Room spam
Main article: Messaging spam
Instant Messaging spam, sometimes termed spim (a portmanteau of spam and IM, short for instant messenger), makes use of instant messaging systems, such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ or Windows Live Messenger. Many IM systems offer a user directory, including demographic information that allows an advertiser to gather the information, sign on to the system, and send unsolicited messages. To send instant messages to millions of users requires scriptable software and the recipients' IM usernames. Spammers have similarly targeted Internet Relay Chat channels, using IRC bots that join channels and bombard them with advertising.
Messenger service spam has lent itself to spammer use in a particularly circular scheme. In many cases, messenger spammers send messages to vulnerable machines consisting of text like "Annoyed by these messages? Visit this site." The link leads to a Web site where, for a fee, users are told how to disable the Windows messenger service. Though the messenger service is easily disabled for free, the scam works because it creates a perceived need and offers a solution. Often the only "annoying messages" the user receives through Messenger are ads to disable Messenger itself. It is often using a false ID to get money or credit card numbers.
[edit] Chat spam
Chat spam can occur in any live chat environment like IRC and in-game multiplayer chat of online games. It consists of repeating the same word or sentence many times to get attention or to interfere with normal operations. It is generally considered very rude and may lead to swift exclusion of the user from the used chat service by the owners or moderators.
The application of the name "Spam" to unwanted communication originates in Chat-room spam. Specifically, it was developed in the chat-rooms of People-Link in the early 1980s as a technique for getting rid of unwelcome newcomers. When someone would enter a chat-room full of friends who were in mid-conversation, and when the newcomer tried to turn the conversation in an unwelcome direction, two veteran members of the room would begin typing in the Monty Python “Spam” routine at high speed. They would fill the screen with “Spam Spam Spam eggs Spam Spam and Spam” etc, and make all other communication impossible. The other members of the room would just wait quietly until the newcomer got disgusted and moved on to a different room.
[edit] Newsgroup spam and forum spam
Main article: Newsgroup spam
Main article: Forum spam
[edit] Mobile phone spam
Main article: Mobile phone spam
Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to customers not only for the inconvenience but also because of the fee they may be charged per text message received in some markets. The term "SpaSMS" was coined at the adnews website Adland in 2000 to describe spam SMS.
[edit] Online game messaging spam
Many online games allow players to contact each other via player-to-player messaging, chatrooms, or public discussion areas. What qualifies as spam varies from game to game, but usually this term applies to all forms of message flooding, violating the terms of service contract for the website.
[edit] Spam targeting search engines (spamdexing)
Main article: Spamdexing
Spamdexing (a portmanteau of spamming and indexing) refers to the practice on the World Wide Web of modifying HTML pages to increase the chances of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. These sites use "black hat search engine optimization techniques" to unfairly increase their rank in search engines. Many modern search engines modified their search algorithms to try to exclude web pages utilizing spamdexing tactics.
[edit] Blog, wiki, and guestbook spam
Main article: Spam in blogs
Blog spam, or "blam" for short, is spamming on weblogs. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site.[1] Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks, both of which accept user contributions.
[edit] Spam targeting video sharing sites
Video sharing sites, such as YouTube, are now being frequently targeted by spammers. The most common technique involves people (or spambots) posting links to sites, most likely pornographic or dealing with online dating, on the comments section of random videos or people's profiles.
Another frequently used technique is using bots to post messages on random users' profiles to a spam account's channel page, along with enticing text and images, usually of a suggestive nature. These pages may include their own or other users' videos, again often suggestive. The main purpose of these accounts is to draw people to their link in the "home page" section of their profile.
YouTube has blocked the posting of links but people can still manage to get their message across by replacing . with "dot"; for instance, example dot com instead of example.com.
Another form of such spam is posting a message which claims to elicit an occurrence, such as an easter egg, the loss of a loved one, or being haunted by a ghost, unless a demand is met, mostly copying and pasting the message to post a certain number of times within a time limit (i. e: "Post this in 5 videos in an hour or you shall die). Such a post targets the gullible, but those who see past usually respond with derision. Some sites have a feature which marks a post as spam or a rating which blocks unwanted comments (with the intent that spam posts garner a low score.)
[edit] Noncommercial spam
E-mail and other forms of spamming have been used for purposes other than advertisements. Many early Usenet spams were religious or political. Serdar Argic, for instance, spammed Usenet with historical revisionist screeds. A number of evangelists have spammed Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages. A growing number of criminals are also using spam to perpetrate various sorts of fraud,[2] and in some cases have used it to lure people to locations where they have been kidnapped, held for ransom, and even murdered.[3]
[edit] Hobbit spam
In early July 2006 there was an enormous increase in unsolicited messages from a spoofed address with approximately half a dozen random letter subjects, containing nothing but three lines from JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit. This follows fairly closely another similar form dubbed "discordian poetry" that appeared to use a random word generator of the same. The messages had no attempt to sell anything; it was theorised that this was a script kiddie ineptly running a spam suite. This was confirmed when shortly afterward the same format messages began appearing with image files overlaying the text (a common spam technique). It is suspected to be a variation from the same source and image overlays will begin appearing.[4]
[edit] Spam as denial of service
Spamming has also been used as a denial of service ("DoS") tactic, particularly on Usenet. By overwhelming the readers of a newsgroup with an inordinate number of nonsense messages, legitimate messages and computing resources can be lost in the deluge. Since these messages are usually forged (that is, sent falsely under regular posters' names) this tactic has come to be known as sporgery (from spam + forgery). This tactic has for instance been used by members of the Church of Scientology against the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup (see Scientology versus the Internet) and by spammers against news.admin.net-abuse.email, a forum for mail administrators to discuss spam problems. Applied to e-mail, this is termed mailbombing. The Usenet Meow Wars (around 1996) were DoS attacks on various newsgroups aimed at specific posters that disrupted the newsgroups where they were active. The DoS attacks launched by Hipcrime, which continue today, are more crafted as DoS attacks on entire newsgroups. The alt.sex newsgroups were rendered uninhabitable by commercial porn site spammers, partially for advertising purposes and partially to destroy a perceived free competitor. (This spawned the creation of the moderated, unspammable soc.sexuality newsgroups.)
Forged e-mail spam has been used as a tool of harassment. The spammer collects a list of addresses, then sends a spam to them signed with the name of the person he or she wishes to harass. Some recipients, angry they received spam and seeing an obvious "source", will respond angrily or pursue revenge against the apparent spammer, the forgery victim. A widely known victim of this sort of harassment was Joe's CyberPost,[5] which has lent its name to the offense: it is known as a joe job. "Joe jobs" have been used against antispammers: in recent examples, Steve Linford of Spamhaus Project and Timothy Walton, a California attorney, have been targeted. Sometimes victims (such as ROKSO-listed spammers) are subscribed to lists that don't practice verified opt-in, such as magazine subscriptions and e-mail newsletters, a practise known as subscriptionbombing.
Spammers have abused resources set up for the purposes of anonymous speech online, such as anonymous remailers. Many of these resources have been shut down, denying their services to legitimate users.
E-mail worms or viruses may be spammed to set up an initial pool of infected machines, which resend the virus to other machines in a spam-like manner. The infected machines can often be used as remote-controlled zombie computers, for more spamming or DDoS attacks. trojans are spammed to phish for bank account details, or to set up a pool of zombies without using a virus.
