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30 Years of “SPAM”

By xeroxss ⋅ May 6, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Last May 3, 2008 marked the 30th years for spam. No not the popular canned staple food but those unsolicited email in our inboxes. Thirty years ago, the phenomenon that was to grow exponentially and become known as spam was born. But despite three decades to learn our lessons, it seems many people still get fooled in to buying products sent to their email inboxes without request.

According to Yahoo News, on May 3rd 1978, a marketer for DEC, a now defunct U.S.computer company, sent out a message to 400 email addresses. The spam, though it wasn’t known as spam then.

The industry which has grown up around the practice has changed somewhat since the 1970s, when the Internet was still the US government-run Arpanet. Which the sender in 1978 had to input each of those 400 email address individually and by hand, whereas now, the whole operation is handled remotely via bot nets.

The practice became known as spam in the 1980s, after the famous Monty Python sketch where a cafe sells Spam meat with everything. This leads a group of invading Vikings to sing the Spam song, which includes the repeating of the word Spam over and over again.

Spam grew substantially once the Internet entered the public domain with the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1983. And it’s still growing, with estimates suggesting it quadrupled between 2004 and 2008.

Spam can vary from adverts for tablets to increase the size of your sexual organs, to miracle weight loss cures, to replica versions of expensive watches. There is also the phishing spam where recipients are invited to give up details of their bank accounts for a share of some sort of hidden wealth.

What’s surprising to hear is how many people fall for spam emails. By one estimate, spam now accounts for 90 percent of all e-mail … as many as 120 BILLION spam messages per day.Pressure to make e-mail spam illegal has been successful in some jurisdictions, but less so in others. Spammers take advantage of this fact, and frequently outsource parts of their operations to countries where spamming will not get them into legal trouble.

Increasingly, e-mail spam today is sent via “zombie networks”, networks of virus- or worm-infected personal computers in homes and offices around the globe; many modern worms install a backdoor which allows the spammer access to the computer. At the same time, it is becoming clear that malware authors, spammers, and phishers are learning from each other, and possibly forming various kinds of partnerships.

E-mail is an extremely cheap mass medium, and professional spammers have automated their processes to a high extent. Thus, spamming can be very profitable even at what would otherwise be considered extremely low response rates.

An industry of e-mail address harvesting is dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling compiled databases. Millions of email addresses can be cheaply purchased.

Tags: 30 years of spam, Featured, spam, spamming, Technology News