This week, the world has marked an anniversary that has changed the face - and other anatomical regions - of email inbox everywhere. The first spam email was sent 33 years ago on Saturday. But the message sent on May 3, 1978 by a marketer for the now defunct DEC computer company to around 400 people on the west coast of the United States was not called spam, and the sender dispatched it without ill intent.
Initially the meaning of the term spamming was: Some thing that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance. However, these days spamming is a sophisticated operation that affects millions and jams ill-prepared email inboxes.
The percentage of spam sent to account holders on Gmail - the email service offered by Google - quadrupled between 2004 and 2008, climbing from 20% to around 80%. "To give you some sense of scale, we have tens of millions of users world-wide," Gmail's Jason Freidenfelds told AFP, adding that only about one percent of spam gets through Gmail's spam spam-filtering system, according to user feedback.
Spam methodology has also changed in the past 33 years. Whereas the sender of the first spam had to type in each recipient's address individually, today the job is often done remotely using cyber-monsters called Botnet.
Botnet have hijacked around 30% of personal and office computers with inadequate security features and use them to dispatch thousands of spams each day. Botnet is a term for a collection of software robots, or bots, which run autonomously and automatically. They run on groups of zombie computers controlled remotely. Here, the term Zombie also needs to be defined. A zombie computer (often shortened as zombie) is a computer attached to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker, a computer virus, or a Trojan horse. Generally, a compromised machine is only of many in a botnet, and will be used to perform malicious tasks of one sort or another under remote direction.
The recruited computers wait for commands that come through anonymous channels and tell them to send spam email to 1,000 people, all unbeknownst to their owners. The people who do this control millions of computers around the world. Don't look to the guy to your left; don't look to the guy to your right. It might be you yourself.
Spam content and motives have also evolved since the 1978 message, which was an invitation to a product launch. Spams today come from Nigerian Princes or fictitious relatives of deceased African dictator’s intent on hoodwinking email account holders in to parting with bank details or cash, in exchange for a slice of the wealth stashed in an offshore account.
More vicious spammers last year shut down government and business websites in European Union member Estonia by bombarding servers with traffic, a technique also used by a new breed of spammers.
But the most common form of spam remains the unsolicited message that tries to sell you a replica Rolex, a miracle weight loss formula, or some medication etc. Twelve percent of internet users have bought something offered to them by spam, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at IT security company Sophos, told.
"Maybe these people are too embarrassed to go to their doctor or they want to save some money, but we have to educate them to report spam, delete spam, but absolutely never buy off spam," social engineering experts believe. "A Brazilian model died after using weight loss medicines she bought off spam....The person who spams does not have strong ethical sense," the experts quoted.
Despite the warnings, the spammers still fish and people still bite. "P.T Barnum was right when he said there's a sucker born every minute," quoted an expert. "I will expand it to say there's a sucker spammed every second."
Initially the meaning of the term spamming was: Some thing that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance. However, these days spamming is a sophisticated operation that affects millions and jams ill-prepared email inboxes.
The percentage of spam sent to account holders on Gmail - the email service offered by Google - quadrupled between 2004 and 2008, climbing from 20% to around 80%. "To give you some sense of scale, we have tens of millions of users world-wide," Gmail's Jason Freidenfelds told AFP, adding that only about one percent of spam gets through Gmail's spam spam-filtering system, according to user feedback.
Spam methodology has also changed in the past 33 years. Whereas the sender of the first spam had to type in each recipient's address individually, today the job is often done remotely using cyber-monsters called Botnet.
Botnet have hijacked around 30% of personal and office computers with inadequate security features and use them to dispatch thousands of spams each day. Botnet is a term for a collection of software robots, or bots, which run autonomously and automatically. They run on groups of zombie computers controlled remotely. Here, the term Zombie also needs to be defined. A zombie computer (often shortened as zombie) is a computer attached to the Internet that has been compromised by a hacker, a computer virus, or a Trojan horse. Generally, a compromised machine is only of many in a botnet, and will be used to perform malicious tasks of one sort or another under remote direction.
The recruited computers wait for commands that come through anonymous channels and tell them to send spam email to 1,000 people, all unbeknownst to their owners. The people who do this control millions of computers around the world. Don't look to the guy to your left; don't look to the guy to your right. It might be you yourself.
Spam content and motives have also evolved since the 1978 message, which was an invitation to a product launch. Spams today come from Nigerian Princes or fictitious relatives of deceased African dictator’s intent on hoodwinking email account holders in to parting with bank details or cash, in exchange for a slice of the wealth stashed in an offshore account.
More vicious spammers last year shut down government and business websites in European Union member Estonia by bombarding servers with traffic, a technique also used by a new breed of spammers.
But the most common form of spam remains the unsolicited message that tries to sell you a replica Rolex, a miracle weight loss formula, or some medication etc. Twelve percent of internet users have bought something offered to them by spam, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at IT security company Sophos, told.
"Maybe these people are too embarrassed to go to their doctor or they want to save some money, but we have to educate them to report spam, delete spam, but absolutely never buy off spam," social engineering experts believe. "A Brazilian model died after using weight loss medicines she bought off spam....The person who spams does not have strong ethical sense," the experts quoted.
Despite the warnings, the spammers still fish and people still bite. "P.T Barnum was right when he said there's a sucker born every minute," quoted an expert. "I will expand it to say there's a sucker spammed every second."