General overview of the concept of spam
What is spam?
Any kind of inconveniences and unwanted harassment on the information network, whether it is e-mails, comments, or replies in the chat services. Sometimes there are purely annoying ad sites that search engines handle.
What we can liken: In fact, I see that it is similar to telephone calls, ads sent to mobile phones, and the like.
How do I know it: There are different forms as follows, if you come across one of them know that it is called spam
Ads for sites or products, sent to your mail, or an advertisement comment located on your site.
Some of the ads are with incredible alluring shows. It offers you profitable sites and guarantees you profit, and that is all incorrect and would be anonymous if you fell into their trap
Find ads for free software. It is mostly in a foreign language
Ads that help you gain more visitors to your site.
Words in a language that you don't understand, which are ads, or a fake donation request, just to take your evidence and annoy you
Inappropriate words of insult and words, with the goal of inconvenience.
How spam works?
Spam performs some basic operations like:
Send trivial correspondence.
Unauthorized use of people's lists without their prior consent to such correspondence.
Commercial ads for email newsletters or people.
Harassment and threatening users in any way.
Target and email inappropriate messages.
The spam has evolved from being just a way to send fake pornographic messages and financial offers, to being more sophisticated processes that include electronic identity theft, where users ’personal details are hacked and used to defraud
What is the purpose of spam?
Some versions of spam are called phishing and send emails in large numbers to trick users and reveal bank account information. Spammers can disguise the source of spam. The Internet is full of unprotected computers, whether mail servers or home computers, which spammers can hack and use as spam generators without their knowledge. And the world is full of service providers that want to look at customers who send thousands or hundreds of thousands of messages a day as long as gullible people respond and buy declared products and services or fall victim to deception.
Profit from spam:
Spam makes more money than sending it, as spam is the cheapest form of advertising. If you want to sell weight loss pills in any other way, you will incur additional advertising costs. As for sending100000
emails a day, it costs a little more than the cost of the Internet connection, a few computers, and some ready-to-use spam software. Take, for example, Jeremy Jeans. He was sentenced to nine years in prison in November 2004 for sending large quantities of spam and misleading routing information on emails to prevent recipients from identifying the sender. Jeans has committed several types of spam crimes, including the use of obscene images, privacy software, and home business planner. According to court documents, large-scale e-mail transmissions by Jeans have achieved sales of approximately10000 cards per month. About two-thirds of people who bought the products asked for their money back, and Jeans continued to make a net profit of more than $100000 a month. Judges have stated that the gross net profit for jeans is estimated at $ 24 million.
What makes people respond to spam offers?
Spam addresses basic human desires: spam usually deals with three desires: sex, money, and self-improvement (weight loss, cheap goods from a well-known designer). Indeed, the buttons that spammers try to press are not much different from what advertisers generally use. So, spammers and merchants are making money from our preoccupation with easing our financial burdens, improving our self-image, and the thing that distinguishes spammers is that they advertise cheaply, are difficult to track, their methods are mostly illegal and they will steal you often.
Anonymous spam provides: A person who wants to purchase pornographic material may like the anonymity provided by the Internet. A person who wants to obtain broken software may feel more comfortable implementing this on the Internet. Computer screen and seemingly intangible Internet communications medium can eliminate shame.
Phishing and phishing
Criminals rely on spam versions to trick recipients into various scams. The most famous trick is the Nigerian oil trick, as the sender of spam deludes him that he has millions of dollars trying to get them out of Africa. (This category is sometimes called trick 419 and is the Nigerian criminal code). The sender promises to transfer a large share of the cash to your bank account, but before that you must send some cash in order to pay the wages and other things. Another famous email trick is the international lottery, you can collect your winnings after you pay a small administrative fee (you will not get anything after that). The essence of this type of trick (and there are dozens of them) is that you think you will get something for free. The truth is exactly the opposite.
How do spam programmers work?
Spam programmers use a variety of methods for the success of their trade. Some of these methods are technically complex and include dealing with Internet protocols used to deliver and track e-mail. Spammers are constantly sending large numbers of messages due to the difficulty in getting messages through the various filters used in service providers and among users. Thus, spammers send millions of messages in the hope that they will find 1 or 2 percent of them way to mailboxes and that 1 or 2 percent of the messages received will generate sales.
Spammers try their best to hide the source of the message because the service providers are moving quickly to reserve spam sources and because the Federal Decree Can-Spam requires that spam senders be imprisoned if captured and criminalized. SMTP is the email sending protocol.SMTP relies on two types of fields for mail delivery: the cover field and message headers.SMTP uses the cover field to tell mail servers about the destination of the message. Each mail server that the message passes through adds its own message header. You can see the progress of the message on its online course by reading the cover headers. But spammers also create fake headers and inject their email messages into mail servers to hide their path. Message headers include the To and From lines that you see in the email. It is very easy to forge these fields. You can do this by putting a bogus email address in the line:From.
How to get the mailing addresses to publish spam?
The simplest way to start the process is by purchasing email address lists. For example, a company called Bulk Email Software Superstore sells you over a million email addresses for 40 $ . A simple internet search will reveal dozens of sites that offer similar offers. Spammers can purchase lists of stolen email addresses.
There are programs on the Internet that search the web pages for email addresses. These programs scan millions of pages, search for the @ sign and build email database databases, which companies and spammers use to collect addresses.
legal responsibility:
By analyzing random samples of unwanted e-mail messages, it was found that a third of these messages contain information that is incorrect in one way or another, which may be illegal and considered a form of fraud.
Also, the US Federal Trade Commission has declared that spam, known as SPAM, is illegal and considered a form of fraud.
The committee found that out of a thousand random messages, 44% of them used a false address to reply to conceal the identity of the message sender or used a misleading site to trick the recipient of the message into opening it. The committee clarified that when opening these messages, approximately 44% of them contained incorrect or misleading information.
Eileen Harrington, a co-director of the committee, said 66 percent of all spam emails that were scanned were likely to violate federal laws by some form of deception.
What is the cost of spam?
On the Internet, spam accounts for about half of all email exchanged globally. In a recent report to the United Nations, its financial losses were estimated at 17,5 billion euros in terms of its export of enormous information sources for a very long time.
Governmental authorities in different countries, companies, and economic unions have taken measures to combat and combat this phenomenon, which has worsened, and it has become a problem for professionals and those interested in the information industry sector.
Many laws have been enacted to protect from them, the most recent of which is the closure of the site that conducted the spam operation or the site benefiting from the spam and may reach the server closure and the site's fine.
While the volume of spam has jumped over the past two years, according to most estimates, companies that provide email services say they cost millions of dollars every year to combat this problem.
The reality is now that about 30 billion e-mails are sent every day on the Internet, and conservative estimates say that 50 percent of all e-mails are spam. (Some estimates raise spam to 90 percent of all email.) You may think that you are not concerned with it as long as insignificant mail does not find a way to your mailbox. But already,15 billion (or more) of trivial messages have caused a huge cost to telecommunications and service providers. Every trivial message that expresses the Internet consumes Internet resources, such as displaying the field on maritime transport lines and the processing capabilities of routers and mail servers that pass messages from one side to another.
Also, telecom operators and service providers invest in software to process and analyze incoming messages, and in the end the user bears the extra cost in the form of a monthly fee.
Statistics about spam:
In2004, a study from Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 5 percent of Internet users had purchased products advertised in spam.
In the same year, Business Software Alliance released poll results stating that 21 percent of respondents had purchased some spam ads.
The following tables show the statistics provided in 2011, 2012 and 2013
Statistics about spam:
The following figure also shows the number of advertising messages multiplying in the year 2016, which doubles the efforts necessary to address them.
