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Evict the Spammers from Your Inbox
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By Paul Judge, CTO, CipherTrust,
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Block Spam and Other Email Threats From Entering Your GatewaySpam, commonly defined as unsolicited commercial email, is apowerful advertising channel for many products and services. Asa result, spamming has become a profitable business, driven bythe low cost of sending email compared to other direct marketingtechniques. The high return on investment for spammers hasresulted in an overwhelming volume of unwanted messages inpersonal and business email boxes. Consider this: Conducting adirect mail campaign costs an average of $1.39 per person,meaning that a response rate of 1 in 14 is necessary just tobreak even on a product with a $20 gross profit. Selling thesame item via unsolicited spam email costs only $0.0004 perperson, meaning that a response rate of 1 in 50,000 gets theseller back to break-even; anything above that is gravy. Withprofit margins like these, it¡¯s easy to see why spammers willtry anything to get past anti spam technology to deliver theirmessages to your inbox.
Types of Spam Threats The recent onset of fraudulent spamvariants such as phishing and spoofing pose an even greater riskthan the spam volume clogging email servers. Spammers usetechniques such as phishing and spoofing to fool users intoopening messages that, at first glance, appear innocuous.
Phishing Phishing is a specific type of spam message thatsolicits personal information from the recipient. Phishers usesocial engineering techniques to fool end users into believingthat the message originated from a trusted sender, making theseattacks especially dangerous because they often con victims intodivulging social security numbers, bank account information orcredit card numbers. In one six-month period from November 2003to May 2004, phishing attacks increased in frequency by 4000%,and the trend continues upward.
An example of phishing is an email that appears to come from abank requesting that users log into their account to update orcorrect personal information. When the users follow a linkembedded in the email, they are redirected to a site that looksand behaves like the expected bank website. However, unbeknownstto the soon-to-be identity theft victims, the site is actuallycontrolled by the scam artists who sent the email; any and allinformation entered by the victim can now be used in a varietyof ways, none of them good.
Spoofing Spoofing is a deceptive form of spam that hides thedomain of the spammer or the spam¡¯s origination point. Spammersoften hijack the domains of well-known businesses or governmententities to make spam filters think the communication is comingfrom a legitimate source.
Today¡¯s spammers are more crafty than ever before and have begunblending elements of both phishing and spoofing into theirmessages, further spinning their web of deception. The toxiccombination of spoofing and phishing presents a major threatthat can trick most anyone into providing personal informationto a stranger.
Toothless Legislation On January 1, 2004, President Bush signedinto law the ¡°Controlling the Assault of Non-SolicitedPornography and Marketing Act of 2003,¡± or ¡°CAN-SPAM¡± Act. Whilewell intentioned, CAN-SPAM has done little or nothing to curbthe flow of unwanted email. In fact, an estimated 97% of allspam email sent in 2004 violated the Act, and the United Statesstill dwarfs other nations in terms of the origin of spam, withCipherTrust research revealing that an astonishing 56.77% of allspam comes from U.S.-based IP addresses. While CAN-SPAM wasdesigned to decrease the overall volume of spam, the exactopposite has happened: in 2004, spam accounted for approximately77% of all email traffic, and phishing attacks continue toincrease exponentially, with studies showing an increase of4000% from November 2003 to May 2004.
Anti Spam Software for the Desktop The dramatic increase in spamvolume has prompted a corresponding surge in stand-alone antispam software solutions for the desktop, all with varying levelsof effectiveness. Some anti spam software uses text filtering toscreen incoming messages for known characteristics of spam,while other solutions rely solely on reputation systems thatmonitor and categorize email senders by IP address according totheir sending behavior. Still other anti spam software uses¡°challenge/response filters¡± to block unapproved mail until thesender responds (manually) to a challenge email sent to theiremail account to verify his or her identity.
With so many different methods of filtering spam, no singlesoftware-based desktop anti spam solution is capable ofeffectively stopping spam before it reaches the inbox. The onlyway to successfully fight spam is to create an anti spam¡°cocktail¡± including reputation services, text filters, constantupdates and a host of other best-of-breed spam blocking methods.Just as importantly, an effective anti spam solution shouldreside at the email gateway, not at the desktop. Withoutprotection at the gateway, mail servers waste massive amounts ofbandwidth and storage space processing every message, wanted ornot, and end users face the unenviable task of deciding what todo with the countless spam messages that successfully reachthem.
Take a Consolidated Approach to Anti Spam Although it takes aperson only a moment to process a message and identify it asspam, it is difficult to automate that human process because nosingle message characteristic consistently identifies spam. Infact, there are hundreds of different message characteristicsthat may indicate an email is spam, and an effective anti spamsolution must be capable of employing multiple spam detectiontechniques.
In addition to effectively identifying spam, businesses must beassured that legitimate mail is not blocked in error. Even onefalse positive, or incorrectly blocked email, can have asignificant impact on businesses today. Accurate spam blockingrequires a combination of tools to examine various messagecriteria combined with real-time research and intelligence data.
By aggregating multiple spam detection technologies like textfiltering, reputation services, traffic analysis and otherbest-of-breed techniques, and placing the solution at the emailgateway in a hardened appliance, enterprises can retake controlof the inbox.
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