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Internet Architecture and the Network Behavior of Spammers
Massive flows of undesirable electronic content, or “SPAM”, appear to have become a common feature of email and mobile messaging systems. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that as of 2005, spam accounted for more than 80% of all messages sent through email, a figure that has lively been surpassed by today.
While spam poses costs on end users of mailboxes in terms of their attention and time, the massive flows also place significant costs on telecommunication companies and businesses that own and maintain the network infrastructure in terms of hardware, software, and the human resources devoted to administration of spam control. Given these costs, over the past 5 years, industry and academic researchers - as well politicians more recently - have placed a great deal of effort at developing tools that can scan electronic content and filter material considered undesirable by the local network efficiently.
Undesirable content varies by organization. For home users with children, it may be important to filter out advertisement for sexual enhancers and inappropriate messages, from the so called “social networking” portals for instance. Failures in the security protocols of the networks often forces end user to buy different security software to protect themselves from the “noise” associated from large volumes of spam, and their children from content considered too inappropriate.
I.1 Network Impact
Small and medium sized businesses similarly have started to increasingly see the negative impact that large volumes of spam can have on the communications systems they use for internal discussions, and for their interactions with buyers and sellers. For instance, as the volume of spam has gone up, many businesses have purchased expensive hardware and software to secure their mailboxes and networks. As well, these businesses have had to add excess capacity in terms of hardware and software to account for the possibility of Denial of Service (DOS) attacks by groups of spam robots that can easily be rented for a small price on the internet to send out large volumes of targeted messages.
As businesses have bought more hardware and software to filter content they find undesirable, spammer have also been highly innovative in bypassing security protocols and installing “zombies” on computers running on certain operating systems. The technologies on offer to filter spam have generally responded to the innovation by spammers at the end user level. Nonetheless, the “spam wars” have resulted in the development of cumbersome and slow software that increases the demands on hardware, administration, as well as the antispam software license itself. Moreover, antispam technologies of the early 2000s increasingly generate many “false positives”, blocking communications that are desirable by mistake.
In addition to purchasing new software and hardware, larger owners and operators of networks have been forced to routinely change the architecture of their systems of servers. Normally, this has meant adding more servers to process the same volume of emails for the end users at the company, university, or government agency.
As the problem of “false positives” in challenge response and other approaches has become larger over time, these organizations have had to also add more storage devices to collect past communications because of the possibility mistakes. For instance, it has become common for spam filters used by network providers to block requests by parties interested in a product or service advertised on the website of a company. This problem is accentuated by the fact that most sophisticated end users do not advertise their electronic addresses any more on the internet because of the possibility of “harvesting” by a spam robot.
I.2 Spam Economics
As an example of the difficulty with combating spam, consider a product that has been a source of income for spammers from the beginnings of the internet, apparently because of the great demand that exists from some end users: Viagra. Although some men may want to receive information about such a product, clearly for a large part of the receivers a message containing such information is at best wasteful of their time and attention, and potentially offensive.
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