Spamming plague gets out of hand
Promising everything from celebrity sex tapes to illicit pharmaceuticals, a global upsurge in e-mail spam is hitting Hampshire businesses.
The latest report on the e-traffic trends by internet security firm Sophos has revealed a 'disturbing rise' in the level of spam between April and June this year.
The figures show an estimated 97 per cent of e-mails received by businesses are now spam, up from 92 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 – and local enterprises have not been spared.
Nicholas Hoath, membership director for the Portsmouth and South-East Hampshire Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber was one of those suffering from the deluge.
He said: 'We noticed about six weeks ago. It suddenly seemed to be ramping up and we'd be getting hundreds of e-mails directed at one person at a time. We've also been seeing spam from addresses which appear to be ours, things like alan@chamber.org
'We've had a lot of people asking to unsubscribe from our e-mail list because of it, which makes communicating with them about upcoming events and activities rather difficult.'
BusinessWeek this week received a very convincing e-mail claiming to be from regional chamber chief executive Maureen Frost. When investigated, the e-mail appeared to have originated from China.
Simon Sparks, from Fareham IT expert Taylor Made Computer Solutions, said it was all too easy for businesses to fall prey to such tricks.
He said: 'One of the common types of spam we have come across at Taylor Made recently is where someone receives a message purporting to be from someone they know, when in fact the message originated from somewhere completely different.
'This commonly happens when a business or individual becomes infected with one of the newer variants of virus called an e-mail worm.
'This can infect a computer and start sending mail pretending to be from e-mail addresses which it finds stored on the computer's hard drive.
'It can be very disconcerting to receive an angry reply to a message you never actually sent!'
Most spam – short for Short, Pointless, Annoying Messages – is unsophisticated, unsolicited advertising.
But others carry malicious software, activated when users click on a link within the e-mail.
It then quietly installs itself on the user's computer, pillaging company e-mail lists, and uses the machine to fire out junk mail to clients, colleagues and random addresses.
Because of this, most spam clogging up the inboxes of businesses across the land is actually sent by entirely innocent third parties – as the chamber of commerce appears to have discovered.
Beside the embarrassment of having your firm's name hijacked, spam can have many other impacts.
Although such programmes act by stealth, they still use computer memory, something which can hamper computer performance.
And lost productivity from dealing with spam can be striking.
For example, take a company of 20 employees, each working 220 days per year, and each receiving just 20 spam e-mails per day.
Taking just five seconds to deal with each one adds up to 122 work hours per year – with an eight-hour day, this averages out at 15 days.
Other unpleasant bugs which piggy-back on to systems by e-mail are malware, which tracks your online movements, and keylogging software, which will record every stroke of a key you have made – compromising confidential documents.
Combating Spam
To foil the spammers, follow these best-practice policies:
Software: Use a consolidated filtering solution, such as MessageLabs or SurfControl.
These filter e-mails at the company's gateway – the single hub where traffic enters.
Usually using a points system, the system instantly gives each e-mail a points rating for rude words, shades of skin tone, attachments, and will quarantine e-mails over a certain number of points.
But there is a catch – the system also allows spammers to claw back points with positive buzz phrases – hence the strange e-mails which contain quotes from the Bible.
Getting in touch: Many spammers utilise 'web-bots' to automatically surf the internet and harvest e-mail addresses from public information and forums.
Instead of providing your e-mail address as a readily accessible link on your website, include a comment or request form for users to fill in to get in touch.
Avoid using the preview function of your e-mail software: Many spammers can track when a message is viewed, even if you do not click on the message or reply.
Previewing a message essentially opens it, telling spammers you are a valid recipient.
Blind is best: Make it a policy, when sending e-mail messages to a large number of recipients, to use the blind copy (BCC) field to conceal their e-mail addresses.
Sending e-mail where all recipient addresses are 'exposed' in the 'To' field makes it vulnerable to harvesting by a spammer's traps.
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