On the internet, there are two worlds. One is the world of the genuine user-developer community trying to use the Internet to enrich their lives. The other world is much darker, where sending gibberish links to users and goading them to click those with a malicious motive is the objective. That world is the world of spam on the internet.

The recent attacks from the ‘spam-bots’ (a word similar to robots) on facebook, livejournal and twitter (twitter is still reeling under those) put a lot of focus on this aspect of the Internet. Did you know that an average 90% of the mail we receive in our inboxes is spam? While most of the spam is filtered, one can imagine how much of a load it puts on the system! Essentially, it was a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Here is what wikipedia says about DDOS:

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

Some data before we move ahead (source: techcrunch):

The top three botnets — or herds of compromised computers controlled by hackers — are sending as many as 21 billion spam messages a day, according to Symantec’s MessageLabs Intelligence report. Which gives us a total of 108 billion spam messages per day!

Spam messages hit a peak of 108 billion on July 28. Much of the spam relates to discounted (and often fake) medicines.

Now, the moot point, why do spammers engage in so much spam? I mean to most, it may seem hardly worth the effort, doesn’t it? Well, No it isn’t. Its a business for many, and lucrative, I may add! There are no entry barriers here. This is considered as a nice way for many students paying ridiculously high tuition fees in countries like US to make some easy money. The startup cost is nil, especially in campus where net access is freely available. Or for that matter, even a housewife can earn by spamming. One can draw parallels to start of one’s life as a spammer and a petty thief – the objective is to earn a quick buck.

But where will all this spamming lead to? Essentially, such spammers are wastage of bandwidth, storage space and escalate costs. The volumes of spam stored by popular mail services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Rediff etc would be enormous to say the least. Also, spammers are getting smarter by the day. Today, even a blog like strat.in gets 150 spam messages everyday. Whenever we delete those, we keep wondering, even if it is for money, is this worth the effort? After all, more than 95% spam gets filtered. On a blog like ours, I would say spam is going to get removed very quickly. Even then, the struggle continues- spammers spam, and authentic internet users keep deleting spam!

PS: Check the latest spam post on Google’s blogger buzz blog! Shows the power of spam, even Google cannot completely shut it off. (There is a 1 in 100 chance that the gobbledygook over here was some sort of a communication method, but I am willing to take that chance)

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