Humour

Living with spam

T A Balasubramanian on how spammers are getting cleverer each day

We are back once more at the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE), an IT trade convention. You, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle Corporation, are accompanied by Danny DeVito, your CTO and associate—who happens to be a biped walking humanoid.

“Ah, so we meet again,” says a baritone voice, and you turn to find Gene Hackman, CEO of Virus Busters, extending his hand in greeting to DeVito, and then, to you.

“Well, it’s a small world, Gene,” says DeVito, looking delighted at the prospect of reviving his Hollywood connection. “So what new invention are you pushing today?”

“Virus Busters is here with something that should make a CIO happy,” says Hackman, with a broad smile. “But before I launch into a sales pitch, did you know that more than a hundred billion unwanted messages clog computer networks every day?”

“Wow!” says DeVito, with a whistle. “I can believe that. I get a dozen each day myself on my desktop. Yesterday, there were six messages from someone calling himself Flash Gordon, who offered, repeatedly, to help me meet ‘delightful angels,’ whatever that means. And then there were some pleasant invitations for personal interaction from people named Arlene, Cindy, Emily, Irene and Katrina, among others.”

“Hmm. They are all hurricanes,” you offer, helpfully.

“And as devastating, too,” guffaws Hackman. “The popular name for this unsolicited assault on your in-box, as you know, is ‘spam.’ That word—a shortened version of ‘spiced ham’—was originally used by computer geeks as a verb describing the flooding of a chat room or a bulletin board with so much data that it crashes. As an Internet-security firm, we stopped thirty billion spams from reaching the mailboxes of our forty-six thousand clients last month alone. We now intercept over 80 spams for every 100 e-mails delivered.”

“Ah, so you have a spam eradicator now in your arsenal?”

“Eradication is still a long way off, Papyrus,” says Hackman. “As the Web evolves into an increasingly common part of business, the sheer volume of spam grows exponentially every year, and so, it would appear, do the sophisticated methods used to send it. Nearly two million e-mails are shot off every second, a hundred and seventy-one billion messages a day.”

“That’s a lot of paper saved, eh?” says DeVito. “But how do they do it? I mean, all this bombarding of mailboxes must be hard work—and expensive.”

“Well, not as hard as it is to keep the spam out of your system. Most of those messages have something to sell. Even the most foolish and unsavory advertisements can earn money—in part because the economic bar for success is so low. If somebody wants to send you junk mail the old-fashioned way, through the postal service, he has to pay for it—the more he sends, the greater the expense. With electronic junk mail, the opposite is true: it costs a pittance to send a million messages—or even a billion—and you, as a recipient, almost always spend more than the sender.”

“So what’s being done about it?”

“It is a battle of wits,” says Hackman, grinning. “The Internet permits anyone with a connection to act without supervision, permission, or control. If you have the e-mail address, you can write directly to whomever you want; protocols and rules that have governed written communication for hundreds of years no longer apply. Now that absolute freedom makes cyberspace an ideal channel to agitate for human rights, sell seventeenth-century vases, or blog about charity and politics. Now tracking these new freedoms with any sense of order or discipline has proved to be nearly impossible, however, and so has virtually every attempt to contain the explosion of spam. All attempts to police the Internet have met with only partial success. The spammers are getting cleverer each day—these guys are relentless and they are everywhere. Each time we think we have them, they respond with something new.”

“But why is it so difficult to catch them? All e-mail includes information about where it is going and who sent it, right?”

“That’s right. However, like they say, on the Internet, no one knows that you are a dog. The mail is sorted along the way by routers—electronic devices that connect networks—which have no way of verifying that you are who you say you are. Most devices for controlling spam would alter that practice, putting significant limits on the free exchange of information. Even many of those who fear that weak security is destroying the Internet are reluctant to support measures that appear to limit free speech.”

“I know,” you say, sagely. “As one expert on the Internet’s wild, wild, nature observes, ‘one person’s spam is another’s critical political update.’ It is a frontier world without rules.”

“Quite so. And the reckless economy of spamming is based on the principle of shooting wild and spraying wide—ideal if you want to be anonymous and fraudulent and reach the masses at almost no cost. Although the success rate of our anti-spam plots usually exceeds ninety-five percent, spam behaves on the Internet in much the same way that viruses do when they infect humans—it may take a million of them to attack an immune system before one gets through, but that one is enough.”

“How did it start?”

“It seems to have popped up in 1994, when two lawyers peppered the Internet with e-mail offering a ‘Green Card Lottery’ to immigrants seeking to stay permanently in the United States. Many millions of messages went out in a few hours, and the two pioneers had their Internet-service account revoked. They got more than a thousand clients, and were soon back online, spamming away. The inspired couple went on to write a book, ‘How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway,’ thereby opening Pandora’s Box. They made a hundred thousand dollars from the first spam project, and it was not long before the spamming industry blossomed.”

“Blossom is hardly the word I would choose, Gene,” says DeVito. “These are nasty guys.”

“That’s right. In 2003, the first commercial virus, called Sobig, was released specifically to infect PCs, inject its code, and then turn those computers into spam guns that fired out millions of e-mails. These were sent by innocent people who never knew that their computers were infected, so the culprits were impossible to trace. Spam had spawned an underworld of hijacked PCs—called zombies or slaves—all part of rogue robot networks—or botnets—controlled by faceless bot herders, who could be anywhere. The herders shoot millions of pieces of spam in a few minutes, and disband, only to regroup and grab thousands of other unwitting computer slaves.”

“So what do we do to keep this menace in check?”

“Ah, this is where we come in,” says Hackman, with a grin. “With Slam Bam, our filter to keep spam wreckers under control. It can cut out most present-day spam, but I must caution you that as our filters become more sophisticated, spam becomes more elusive. Most anti-spam is like those antibiotics that end up becoming ineffective with each new outbreak as they encounter a more resistant strain of bugs.”

“So you can’t win, eh?” says DeVito.

“Not really,” says Hackman. “But we can put up a damn good fight against Flash Gordon.”