\nDoes anyone else miss the good old days?<\/p>\n

You know: the days when a spam message was an email that started out \u201cMy Dear\u2026\u201d As a repeat offender of using the English language, I recognized the gaffe right away. The sender, with his ho-hum grasp of the language, committed a linguistic atrocity by misinterpreting the purpose of the formal salutation \u201cDear Sir\/Madam,\u201d gleaning the literal meaning of \u2018dear\u2019 and assuming that it was okay to open a letter intended to bilk you out of thousands of dollars by using an informal and nonstandard greeting.<\/p>\n

(sigh) Yes, those were the good old days. When spam was either a mysterious yet delicious canned meat packed in jelly, or something that frequently invaded our inboxes and failed to trick all but the most na\u00efve and decidedly non-clever of folks. At times, it was even entertaining, was spam email. I myself got plenty of laughs over the princes from Nairobi, the old dying women from Spain, the promises of quick and easy male enhancement \u2013 all in one little miracle pill, mind you \u2013 and an Internet of spam that, like Douglas Adams\u2019 Earth<\/a>, seemed mostly harmless.<\/p>\n

Those days are over. Your daddy\u2019s Internet is gone and the one that\u2019s replaced it is a golem that barely resembles the pre-Microsoft Hotmail. The days when Yahoo and Altavista were the co-kings of the search castle and Google was a mote in Larry Page\u2019s eye is a distant dream, and the only resemblance between the spam of yore and today\u2019s spam is that it\u2019s still an ugly monster born in the minds of criminals who would gladly part you from your hard-earned money.<\/p>\n

One only has to Google spam to understand what\u2019s happened to the stuff. No longer a single entity deposited in an inbox, it\u2019s now a chimera formed in spam campaigns \u2013 spampaigns \u2013 that leverage multiple tiers. Stories this week discuss the SpamSoldier spambot<\/a> that\u2019s been invading Android phones for some time now.  We\u2019re lulled into a false sense of security by the perennial articles that tout a reduction in spam email<\/a> (I say that because, dollars to donuts that next quarter I\u2019ll be writing an article about the sharp increase in spam email); all the while, we find articles that discuss how social media spam is threatening the enterprise level, posing a serious security risk to organizations that just can\u2019t grasp the slippery eel of social media inside the firewall.<\/p>\n

An article<\/a> that uses Breaking Bad<\/em> as its example (in case you\u2019ve been living on Mars, that\u2019s the blockbuster show by AMC whose meth trip is coming to a predictably unceremonious end this weekend) discusses how micro-targeting \u2013 the practice of using themes and timing that might appeal to and nab in their net of deception the subsets of users who key into those themes \u2013 is becoming more prevalent. In fact, we\u2019ve seen it for some time now, using holidays and events to trick distracted users into clicking.<\/p>\n

And then an article<\/a> opines on the war being waged on the social Web, asking whether we\u2019re being set up to lose that war because spam is choking it up into an unwieldy demon that will bite our heads off it we\u2019re not careful (my words, not the author\u2019s). In the article, Molly McHugh points out that social spam has risen 355 percent in the first half of 2013, a figure that should scare the bejeebers out of any network admin whose organization uses Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or other social media vehicles as a routine part of its business operations.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s it all mean? Well, email spam is still alive and well, although based on who you read<\/a> and when<\/a>, you might think otherwise. Spam emails are different now, for the most part. They use different tactics that are sneakier and sometimes in the case of phishing emails, more believable. They\u2019re more heavily laden with malware<\/a>, in the hopes that unsuspecting users will click malicious links. Spam email is also being used as a distraction<\/a> from a simultaneous security event. And don\u2019t dismiss the evil of \u2018legitimate\u2019 spam<\/a> as an ongoing headache.<\/p>\n

SMS spam is nasty stuff, because it feels like a personal violation when SMS spams<\/a> arrive on your phone<\/a>, and because if you don\u2019t have a texting plan, it costs you and there\u2019s nothing you can do about it. Social media spam continues to rise in numbers and nastiness, and let\u2019s not forget the good old home phone, perhaps the ultimate violation of one\u2019s privacy.<\/p>\n

The point here is that spampaigning \u2013 the use of multiple delivery mechanisms for spam \u2013 is probably something we\u2019ll have to live with for a long, long time. It\u2019s not a stretch to imagine that the spammers \u2013 the criminals \u2013 are utilizing multiple methods to commit their crimes. Why wouldn\u2019t they? Apparently, it\u2019s quite a lucrative venture<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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