Sabtu, Februari 23, 2008
Spam - It Used To Be Lunchmeat In A Can - Now It's A Costly Annoyance
Attributes of Spam
There are some essential characteristics of all spam:
* It is unsolicited and uninvited
* It promotes products or services for sale - a transaction is proposed.
* Spam can also refer to any unwanted email such as chain letters from known senders or commercial email from retailers you have dealt with previously.
Why do Spammers Spam?
Simple; there's potential money in it with easy leverage of resources. Spammers send out their messages in the millions in the hope that a few people reply. Income is gained from actual products sold. Response rates and profit margins are typically low - but so are the costs. Tools and mailing lists for sending spam are cheap and easy to use. Many operations are in warehouses or spare bedrooms.
The millions of messages spammers can send in a day can add up to significant revenues with even the most modest response rates. All a spammer needs to send spam is:
• An email address list. These can be bought cheaply on a CD, or harvested
• Spamming software. This is inexpensive and easily obtained over the Internet
• An email server. To hide their identities, spammers often piggyback on top of an unsuspecting third party's mail servers and relay spam through them. These servers are known as open relay servers.
• A financial opportunity. There seems to be no shortage of opportunities for spammers. Common spam topics include product sales, memberships to adult websites and the Nigerian Money Letter to name a few.
How Are Email Addresses Acquired
There are several sly methods of collecting email addresses. Here are seven ways spammers can get your email address
1. From user registrations at unscrupulous sites
2. From user newsgroup postings
3. From user chat sessions
4. From spambots that crawl the web for any @ sign
5. From email lists the spammer buys
6. From mailing lists to which users subscribe
7. By randomly generating name combinations for your domain
How Does Spam Affect Me?
So why all the concern for something that can easily be deleted? As you will see below, spam is a real problem for organizations around the globe. The volume of spam is growing, it costs corporate organizations by lowering productivity and consuming IT resources, and it can represent a potential legal liability.
Incidence of Spam
Spam has rapidly emerged as a major issue for organizations and individuals alike, particularly in the United States. A recent Marshal Report indicated these observations for the week ending Feb 17, 2008:
• 10.1% of email is now image spam - an increasing amount.
• 100% increase in the SVI over the past seven months. The SVI is a measure of the volume of spam sent to a representative sample of the honeypot domains that we monitor. Spam volumes have continued to creep upwards since the New Year.
• 61% Health and 27% Product - the two largest categories of Spam being sent
• United States, Russia and China are the top three countries where Spam originate
• Corporate organizations outside the US typically have a lower incidence of spam.
Costs of Spam
Spam is not only annoying - it costs. Some of the figures can be staggering - estimates in lost productivity are now 12-15 billion dollars in a year. These amounts are so large, that they begin to become unrelated. Perhaps similar to trying to comprehend the amount of our national debt.
Let's try to narrow the cost estimates to a single mid-sized company. Keep in mind this relates to email, which almost every employee has and uses hourly. If a portion of each hour is spent reviewing and removing spam, then the cumulative costs can be more relevant.
In an online model that determines spam's costs, a scenario was created. The model had 1,000 employees with an average salary of $35,000 receiving an 80% spam rate (which is currently 91%) on 100 messages daily. The computed cost for staff time, bandwidth and storage was over $565,000 annually.That equates to an additional sixteen employees before benefits. That is how Spam can cost.
Conclusion
* We are all now in the electronic world.
* We rely more on email in our business and personal lives daily.
* As long as we have open email accounts on the Internet, spammers will attempt to penetrate with their scams.
* Spamming is a low cost, boiler room operation that can be conducted from anywhere in the world.
* A return of less than 1 percent on millions of emails can be lucrative.
* Ignoring Spam will continue to increase your staff's admin time and cut into your productivity, bandwidth and storage. All costs to you.
We work with companies of all sizes to assure their messaging is in compliance and spam is blocked effectively. Our current blockage rate is greater than 99.5%. Our solutions are state of the art, quick to implement, cost effective and provide the comfort to know your data is secure. A phone discussion is a great way to assess your environment and what would be the best action plan. Visit our website Enclave Data to learn more.
You have the responsibility to maintain your company's digital environment. With the right tools you can now also have the control to assure productivity and compliance for your company's assets.
Dan Schutte is the President of http://enclavedata.com, specializing in messaging security, content filtering, anti-spam software, email/IM archival and compliance. Visit our http://www.enclavedata.com to read actual Case Studies of how companies have successfully protected their data network and met compliance requirements. Free trials and downloads are available on all of our products.
Please feel free to republish this article provided a working hyperlink remains to our site.
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