Johannesburg, 16 May 2003
A US spammer who has become known as the notorious Buffalo Spammer was recently arrested and fined for stealing over 300 identities to sign-up for new accounts, and then sending over 800 million pieces of spam to harvested e-mail account holders costing ISPs, businesses and individuals millions of dollars in both wasted time and money.
Shutting down Howard Carmack`s various accounts didn`t stop him, and prosecutors didn`t want to get involved because sending spam is not currently a crime anywhere in the world.
"The volume of junk e-mail has reached a critical threshold that requires swift action to protect the Internet correspondence millions of people take for granted," comments Matt Newnham, product manager for local software distributor Camsoft Solutions, supplier of world-renowned eScan suite of anti-spam and anti-virus software.
"The problem has reached a pivotal point, and unless the industry comes together with technologists and lawmakers immediately to outlaw spamming across the board, e-mail is at risk of being run into the ground. We need to make junk e-mailing a crime, with stiff criminal penalties for repeat offenders," he added.
The Howard Carmack case shows why we need to get tough with junk e-mailers. Subsequent to his arrest on Monday by a private attorney working for Internet service provider EarthLink, judgement was granted against him in the amount of $16.4 million stemming from his scheme. The arrest is a product of the tough new stance on the part of state and federal law enforcement against the sending of bulk unwanted e-mail, a practice that costs corporations and government billions each year in lost productivity, and clogs consumer e-mail boxes with hundreds of daily offers for free porn sites, cheap mortgages, drugs and financial schemes. At one point, Carmack was responsible for just over 10% of the 8.75 billion spam e-mails sent via EarthLink each year.
Newnham also apportions some of the blame for the rise in the number of spams on consumers who purchase products from spam e-mails. "Spammers wouldn`t send out junk e-mail if nobody - absolutely nobody - ever clicked through to buy anything," he comments, adding that people - both at work and at home - need to be told to never open unsolicited mail. "If they inadvertently do so, they must never respond or click through to the Web site it`s luring them to. And for those who do get that far, never buy anything," he adds.
Earlier this week, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a joint initiative to combat spam through techniques such as identifying and restricting messages with deceptive headers. Although this can be seen as a step in the right direction, it is a known fact that criminals - and that`s exactly what spammers have become - usually stay at least one step ahead of those trying to prevent them from carrying out their dastardly deeds.
The corporate world is currently best protected against Internet intrusion - be it by malicious computer code or spam - by installing the necessary protection software. Although many see this as an added cost to business, what they do not realise is that such software can pay for itself within a period of one to three months if wasted time and Internet bandwidth is taken into account, as demonstrated by a recent gathering of technology experts, government officials, industry executives and lawyers who flocked to Washington to discuss the problem of unwanted commercial e-mail and what to do about it.
A new, comprehensive legislation package to combat spam was recently unveiled in the US at the Federal Trade Commission`s first ever spam forum. The plan would establish costly fines for spamming activity, mandate jail time for repeat offenders and create a `Do-Not-Spam` list of e-mail addresses similar to the FTC`s `Do-Not-Call` registry that has succeeded in a number of states in virtually eliminating unwanted telemarketing calls.
The plan would also make it a crime to harvest e-mail addresses, eliminating the major technique spammers use to compile their address lists, institute expansive anti-fraud measures that would help e-mail filters easily separate spam from personal or business-related e-mail and clamp down on deceptive information that the FTC estimates is present in 66% of all junk e-mail worldwide. However, the first line of defence is still measures put in place by end-users to block spam.
Camsoft Solutions is exhibiting at the Computer Faire in Sandton and can be found at Stand M21 in Hall 2.
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