Category: Spam

“The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face (in the future). It is time to think differently.” Reading useless messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64 seconds to get back on the ball after doing so, according to a recent study by the social and business responsibility watchdog ORSE. “Poorly controlled, the email can become a devastating tool,” it warned.

There is more and more criticism of email and how it can distract you. Here is an article from the Telegraph about a French company where Staff to be banned from sending emails. What is interesting is that the CEO of Atos is advocating using instant messaging and a Facebook-like social network. This is supposed to be less distracting.

There is hope in the battle against spam. The New York Times is reporting on a study that has identified a weak point in the spam chain. See Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions – NYTimes.com.
The study by Kirill Levchenko and colleagues is titled, Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (PDF of unpublished manuscript). They followed up on a lot of spam ads and bought thousands of dollars of stuff (like Viagra.) They then analyzed the chain of servers and services that make spam a viable business. The weak point is the credit card processing, because this is a business and some money has to be gathered at some point to finance it. There are a small number of banks that process the credit card transactions, and these banks may be vulnerable to political pressure.

Finally, we have used this data to provide a normative analysis of spam intervention approaches and to offer evidence that the payment tier is by far the most concentrated and valuable asset in the spam ecosystem, and one for which there may be a truly effective intervention through public policy action in Western countries. (p. 15)

I just found an interesting site about Nigerian scams. The site has some history, it has a bibliography of books on the subject, it has an archive of example emails, and it tracks people who seem to be fraud artists. While the site at times seems to have an amateur side it has a lot of information.

I must admit that I’m interested in this as I’ve begun to think of spam as a form of creative writing. Spammers have to tell a story that will entice people to start up a dialogue so that they can ask for an advance. Who writes these stories? What sorts of people maintain the dialogue? What do these stories tell us about ourselves? Why Nigeria?

The New York Times has a disturbing story, Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks that suggests the Russians may have practiced cyberattack techniques against Georgia before the surface attack in what is the first case of a “known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.”

the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.

Georgia, however, doesn’t seem to have noticed as they don’t have that many internet sites and don’t use it much in everyday life/business. One wonders how a successful shutdown of the Internet in Canada would affect us … what would break down?