Fixing the Spam problem

As we venture now three months into 2008, where are we heading with spam?  Some say its only going to get worse and yet some say its going to get cleaned up.  I for one think that we as a internet community are going to continue to see an in flux of hostile individuals or groups of hackers and spammers not stopping or slowing down. 

What we here at Spacequad AntiSpam Services have seen is a growing threat to our infrastructure that seriously needs an over-haul.  The ever growing list of spammer domains, and hackers, out there are putting an enormous strain on resources that a great many of the legit domain owners, trying to have a site up and running to show the world information.  However, given the vast amount of information out there, we as the good guys, need to police it more, and turn in the criminals that violate our rights and privacies.  We will touch on two areas that have the most spam problems and without making any of the other types of spam less important, as all spam, no matter what form it put into.

1. Email Spam - Email spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).

   Unsolicited means that you lack affirmative consent from the recipient. If you found an address on a web page, on a mailing list, or on Usenet, you don't have consent. If you got an address in gift, sale or trade, you don't have consent. If someone gave you an address for a particular purpose (for example, a commercial transaction, information about your products, or after-sales support) you only have consent to use it for that particular purpose. Use for any other purpose requires a new consent.

   Bulk means that you sent a substantively similar message to more than 200 addresses a day. A message that differs from recipient to recipient only by details (e.g. the recipient's name, account number, blocks of random words, characters, numbers, or non-rendered text) is the same message. A message that uses different wording to express the same idea is the same message. If you send the same message to 200 different people day after day, it's spam.

   1. Email Spam can be conquered by adjusting the smtp protocol some more and adding a security flag to it.  By this we mean that if you add  a control check to the HELO command that all mail server listen for, a great portion of the spammers and illegal server operators will be left out in the cold and not be able to connect to legit systems.

    

2. Web Spam -  Web pages comprised of advertisements and links to other Web sites that contain mostly ads.

   The pages may pretend to provide assistance or facts about a particular subject, but the help is often meaningless and the information shallow. Web spam pages use repetitive text in the copy or meta tags in order to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results. See cloaking. See also popup ad.
    

   1. Web Spam is a more difficult task to accomplish but can be done.  With all the new web portals being setup everyday, spammer are taking advantage of all the weaknesses and holes in the software.  There are several CMS's and forum software out in the wild and they all have some type of flaw, whether it was a programmers error or the fault of the person installing it on the server.  Every single one of them can be secured if the person installing them take some time to install it correctly and put in plugins or mods to further thwart the hackers and spammers.  We intentionally did not mention what software is good or bad.  As that would be putting a biased opinion on a given software, and that would be beyond the scope of this article.

With all said above, we want to let everyone know that if you consistently watch what you are doing and monitor your domain, you will lessen the impact of a spammer or hacker taking control of your server.

If you are interested in finding out more about what you can do to increase the security of your domain, please join our discussion forums and let us know what your current situation is and what you need help with.  If you cannot find a proper board to make your postings to, then contact us and we will set that area up.  Please remember, we do have allot to offer, all you have to do is, ask.