original article from the
York Region Business Times

Spam threatens businesses
COMPUTERS/ UNWANTED E-MAILS WASTE TIME RESOURCES

Jun 25, 2004 - Chris Traber

Spam, the scourge of e-mail users, is no longer a mere annoyance. It is fast becoming a significant threat to the wellbeing of individuals and businesses throughout York Region.

Equivalent, on the nuisance scale, to unsolicited phone calls, junk mail and door-to-door sales, spam has become prevalent for varied reasons, said Brent MacLean, chief executive officer and senior systems engineer at J.B. MacLean Consulting Inc., a firm specializing in network design and security.

"Spam has been around for almost a decade," he said. "It's a multi-level marketing activity in the sense that companies lure people into business by reselling lists for very little money. It's easy to send e-mails and companies are actually providing that service to those who want to quickly get into the business. It takes a very small success rate to make a profit and there's an infinite number of things that can be sold to someone who has an e-mail address."

Sending spam does not cost the spammer anything except the cost of an Internet connection, Mr. MacLean said.

"The main reason for the prevalence of spam is that people and organizations are reluctant to pay for simple and effective solutions or at least learn about them," he said.

Claudiu Popa, president of Informatica Corp, an e-business consultancy that works in collaboration with Mr. MacLean, noted legitimate e-mail users are easy prey for unscrupulous address collectors.

"Generally, spammers exchange e-mail lists, so if you give it to one, you can bet that you've been added to dozens of others, making it almost impossible to remove yourself from it," Mr. Popa said.

The question is how does an e-mail address end up there in the first place?

"People sign up for freebies online or distribution lists which get re-sold numerous times," he said. "Web spiders routinely visit sites and extract or harvest e-mail addresses and spammers can probe mail servers for random e-mail addresses and eventually get to ones that are easy to guess. They can also search online directories and domain name records."

Internet sites with poor security can be compromised by hackers and your personal and credit card information can be easily captured, Mr. Popa said.

"Spammers do it because a very low response rate can result in a tidy profit and more recently, they have started partnering with virus writers and organized crime syndicates to carry out illegal activities and defraud Internet users," Mr. MacLean said.

The dangers of virulent e-mails are numerous.

"Opening infected e-mails may open a backdoor that allows malicious individuals to take control of a user's machine without their knowledge," Mr. MacLean said. "It can destroy important data and can damage the operating system beyond repair, necessitating a reinstall."

Spam, contaminated with a bug, also enables a hacker to steal the identity of a user. A growing felony, many employ stolen bank passwords, social insurance numbers, names and addresses to defraud rightful owners.

Hostile e-mails can also use the infected host computer to taint others by re-sending the contaminated program to other addresses in the user's address book. Equally disconcerting is the fact infected spam can be used to cause the user's computer to unwittingly send even more spam to other computers on the Internet all the while making the actual spammer untraceable.

There are, according to Mr. MacLean and Mr. Popa, numerous ways to protect yourself against spam.

"Use the filters provided by your Internet service provider (ISP) to filter out spam," Mr. Popa said. "This gets rid of 50 to 75 per cent of unwanted e-mails. Remove your e-mail address from any websites where it might be listed and do not reply to spam messages, even if they have a link that says 'remove me'. That only makes matters worse."

Use a new version of Microsoft Outlook that has stronger protection against spam and will filter out e-mails that contain questionable keywords, Mr. MacLean recommended.

"This functionality is provided by practically all e-mail programs," Mr. MacLean said. "Use anti-spam software such as MailWasher to detect and eliminate e-mail while it's still on the server and use Bayesian filters that use a technology akin to artificial intelligence to determine the validity of messages."

He also advised each website's privacy policies should be reviewed, opting to give personal data only to reputable sites.

As Internet-based villainy and vandalism increases, the authorities follow suit with countermeasures and penalties.

"All countries are introducing laws against unsolicited e-mail and, in some cases, the punishment exceeds the crime in scope and extent," Mr. Popa said. "In Canada, privacy laws prevent organizations from collecting, using and storing information without expressed approval of its owner, so the vast majority of unsolicited e-mail received by Canadians originates either in the U.S. or Asia.

"In such cases, the only recourse we have is to report them to blacklist services such as SpamCop.net and have them blocked out by ISPs."

Informatica, in tandem with J.B. MacLean, implements spam control solutions to achieve nearly 100 per cent success in spam filtering.

They also offer security protection for systems and user education programs to boost employee awareness about related issues.