Study Reveals Where Spam Comes From
US researchers at the Center for Democracy and Technology found that e-mail addresses posted on websites or in newsgroups attract the most spam. To determine the source of spam, the researchers set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses and waiting six months to see what kind of mail the addresses were attracting. Researchers posted e-mail addresses on websites, newsgroups, job sites, auctions, and discussion boards. They also provided e-mail addresses in response to services on popular websites such as eBay and Amazon. Finally researchers posted addresses in the Whois database of information about the owners of domain names. The researchers found that spammers used harvesting programs such as robots and spiders to record e-mail addresses. One way of avoiding this mail-harvesting, said the team, is to replace characters in an e-mail address with human-readable equivalents - for example john@domain.com would become john at domain dot com. Another is to replace the characters in an e-mail address with the HTML equivalent. Email addresses that used either of these two methods did not attract a single piece of spam. In total, the researchers received over 10,000 e-mail messages to the 250 e-mail addresses they had created. Only about 1,600 of these were legitimate e-mails. Over 97% of the spam was sent to addresses that had been posted on public websites. The number of messages received was linked to the popularity of the website. The research also found that in all cases where researchers asked not to receive commercial e-mails, their wishes were respected. The system also received 8,000 spam messages to addresses that had never been used for any purpose or submitted to anyone. Such brute force attacks, in which spammers attempt to send e-mails to every possible combination of letters that could form an e-mail address, are relatively common. These messages were not included in the final data. [Full story: Where spam comes from - BBC News]
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