Spam

You've devised a brilliant opt-in marketing campaign, complete with an educational newsletter that's all the rage. Your sales are spiking and your list is growing.

Then it happens -- some spammer uses phraseology that is similar to your corporate name or some malicious code writer launches a virus with a common word in your product description. Suddenly your permission-based e-mail is blocked by half the ISPs on the planet.

Frustrating, to say the least. But you are not alone.

An estimated 250 illegal websites operated by a sophisticated ring of "spammers" using unsolicited, deceptive emails to lure consumers into buying unapproved counterfeit drugs, pirated software and pornography no longer exist in cyberspace, Attorney General Tom Reilly announced today.

"Spam" e-mail, used for years to sell snake-oil medicine, penny stocks and suspiciously low mortgages, is now being used to sell neo-Nazi ideology as well.

A new computer worm sent right-wing German messages to millions of computers over the weekend in what anti-virus experts said was a sign that spam has become a tool for propagandists as well as scam artists.

"We have seen a trend in which worm authors are using spam not to hawk goods, but as a tool for political propaganda," said Scott Chasin, chief technical officer for the anti-virus firm MX Logic.

For all the problems spawned by spammers, one of the most troubling is that no one can agree on how to defeat them.

Everyone with a stake in the fight has a solution: The legal departments at Internet service providers, or ISPs, think it's high-profile lawsuits. Tech companies, not surprisingly, think it's technology -- specifically, the anti-spam products some of them sell.

The developer of a spam-fighting service is trying to airbrush the Web, asking some Web sites to remove references to criticisms that it sent out spam two years ago.

Brian Cartmell, chief executive of Spam Arrest LLC, said the posts in question reflect past practices, but people who read them today might mistakenly believe the policies are current.

"Sometimes people cancel their subscriptions because they believe it's some sort of ongoing practice," Cartmell said.

BigPond has moved to boost its anti-spam systems as the Internet service provider revealed its existing network filters were rejecting six million spam or virus-infected e-mails every day.
Managing director Justin Milne said in an e-mail to BigPond users last night he had given the go-ahead "to further boost" the filters as spam continued to be a "common problem" for Internet users.

Western Union has advised the public to ignore any email which informs recipients that they are richer by $2300.

People who called the toll free number of the money transfer company in the UAE were told yesterday that hackers were using the internet to send spam. "It is fake. We are receiving a lot of complaints. We transfer money from people-to-people and not through emails. The address being used by the sender is not ours," a Dubai resident, who had received the email, was told by the person manning the toll free number.

Spam which advertises share issues has rocketed by 700 per cent last month, according to security firm Clearswift.

The company explained that the share tips are part of so-called 'pump and dump' scams that were popular in the late 1990s during the internet boom, and have continued ever since.

'Pump and dump' involves boosting interest in the shares, causing the stock price to rise and allowing the spammer to make a profit.

Almost one million net addresses owned by UK cable firm Telewest have been blacklisted by an anti-spam group.
The Spam Prevention Early Warning System blacklisted the addresses because many of the machines using them have been hijacked by spammers.

The army of remotely-controllable machines have probably been recruited by viruses and worms.

Telewest said it knew about the problem and was working with customers to regain control of their home computers.

The blogosphere is buzzing with rumors about a strange viral marketing campaign concerning CNN, that may be promoting the cable channel or squelching criticism of it -- or perhaps both at the same time.