Deprecated: Function create_function() is deprecated in /home/hidefide/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wr-pagebuilder/core/core.php on line 127
{"id":635,"date":"2018-05-02T16:35:16","date_gmt":"2018-05-02T16:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/icaruspressblog.wordpress.com\/?p=635"},"modified":"2019-04-17T11:22:53","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T11:22:53","slug":"university-of-texas-gets-medieval-on-spam-tracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/02\/university-of-texas-gets-medieval-on-spam-tracking\/","title":{"rendered":"University of Texas Gets Medieval on Spam (Tracking)"},"content":{"rendered":"

$\"download$ Dealing with email spam is often a reactionary process; we\u2019re all busy working on other daily tasks, and when the nasty stuff comes in, it\u2019s a frenzy of crapulence that can quickly get out of control. Whether you\u2019re a systems administrator or an end user, the result is the same. You flag the mail as spam and give it an unceremonious one-way trip to the trash can, hoping that this will be the time when the madness will truly come to an end. Well, researchers at the University of Texas have taken a different approach to spam. Rather than take it sitting down (okay, chances are they\u2019re sitting down in any event), the researchers are taking the battle to the Interwebs to figure out where the social disease known as spam is being spawned.<\/p>\n

Since 2011, researchers at the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce (CREC) at the University of Texas at Austin have been putting a tail on spam and reporting it on their website, SpamRankings.net<\/a>. And it\u2019s a pretty interesting read. Complete with a nifty infographic that nails down some useful facts and tips, there\u2019s a great article on the university\u2019s website<\/a> that tells the tale of these stalwart spam warriors.<\/p>\n

CREC Director Andrew Whinston points out that the main source of spam is the users whose computers have succumbed to malware. \u201cMost spam is sent from computers compromised by botnets or phishing. The same security problems that let those problems in could be used for worse things, ranging from denial of service attacks to identity theft to blackmail to alteration of financial records.\u201d SpamRankings.net publishes the organizations that are hosting spam, and often the hosting is done unwittingly. The hope, the article points out, is that \u201cbad publicity will influence these companies to fix their security problems.\u201d John S. Quarterman, the senior researcher on the project and author of a number of books about the Internet, points out that if the approach is successful, it will \u201cenable a strong policy argument that more disclosure of breaches for more reputational rankings would improve security even more.\u201d Amen to that.<\/p>\n

The endgame<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The endgame seems to be to change the way people think about spam. \u201cThe Spam Rankings project\u2019s leaders hope you will recognize spam as more than annoying clutter. Far from a mere nuisance, they suggest, spam is the smoke that signals a dangerous fire. Spam at its worst poses a security threat and portends infection and theft.\u201d The ranking show progress, too. \u201cSome organizations, including hospitals, have made dramatic improvements over a few months, with some appearing to have cleaned up their spambot problem entirely.\u201d The article concludes that this project is working. \u201cThe companies really did clean up their act partly in response to the rankings. Quarterman also noted that SpamRankings has even received a letter from one large medical group saying \u201cThe listing on your site added additional impetus to make sure we \u201cstay clean\u201d so in that regard, you are successful.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all in the numbers<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Interestingly, the July 2013 snapshot \u2013 provided in the infographic \u2013 shows that 2.9 billion spam messages were sent from the U.S. that month, or ten spam messages sent per man, woman and child. Other interesting statistics:<\/p>\n
\n
France and Denmark sent out the most messages per man, woman, and child in July, at 15 and 16 messages respectively<\/li>\n
Among the top 10 countries, the U.S. was responsible for more than one-third of spam messages, at 38.9%<\/li>\n
July 31 saw the most spam traffic in July, with 95.01 million messages sent<\/li>\n
July 18 saw the least spam traffic in July, with 54.24 million messages sent<\/li>\n
Of the top 10 U.S. organizations unwittingly hosting spam, there are several cloud providers, Internet hosts or providers, and cable companies, including Comcast Cable (number 3), Cogent PSI (number 7), and Verizon Internet Services (number 9). The top 10 companies hosted 1.2 billion messages in the month of July, or 27,000 emails per minute<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The article, and the site SpamRankings.net, certainly provide a lot of useful information, and seeing the information in this light \u2013 especially the rankings themselves \u2013 puts the spam discussion in a whole different light. The project at University of Texas at Austin is a noble one, to be sure, if only to help educate those who know how much they hate receiving spam, but who may not stop and look to see if they\u2019re actually contributing to the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dealing with email spam is often a reactionary process; we\u2019re all busy working on other daily tasks, and when the nasty stuff comes in, it\u2019s… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[11,9,10,8,7],"class_list":["post-635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","category-spam","tag-allspammedup","tag-bot","tag-botnet","tag-malware","tag-spam","jsn-master"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1738,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions\/1738"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hidefideas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}