Online Threats: Spam & E-Mail Spoofing

On this topic, i'll be combining two online threats together, which is both spam & e-mail spoofing. While E-mail spoofing is a standalone topic, spam is closely related to both phishing & the topics on Botnets (part of Network Attacks), which i will discuss after this topic. Even though the two threats differents significantly, i chose to discuss both together in this post mainly because they are both a nuisance to an element of your computering life - your host-based & Web-based e-mail inbox.

1. E-mail Spam

Commonly refered to as "junk mail", spams are designated to annoy users who have an e-mail service. Even though spams are usually harmless because most only facilitates the advertisement of certain stuffs (which most people had little interests in them), it can be considered as an annoyance. People getting hit by lots of spams normally had their e-mail inbox filled up daily by spam e-mails and the next thing they know, they are spending lots of time in detecting which e-mail is spam and which is not before deleting them all. If they ignore the current load of spam e-mails, they will have even more to read and to delete during the next day. Some spams are on advertising certain stuffs, but there are spams that are of pointless content,usually with threatening/frightening messages which serves to waste user's time on reading its contents.

Spam e-mails are generated by its creators, and by collecting our e-mail addresses vis different methods, they begin sending them out to our inbox at random. Spams are growing at a steady rate over the years and only recently began decreasing due to refined spam filtering by Webmail services. Most spam e-mails point to a certain website, which can be financial websites, products websites, leisure websites & even adult websites. A small portion af spam directs user to a scam website, where real threats looms.

Those with immediate contact with me via hotmail address...remember why i always mention that no spams are to be delivered to my hotmail account? That is because sometimes Webmail users are not aware of which e-mails are spams and which are not. Spamming can only be forgiven when users are not aware that their computer is infected with a botnet, which essentially encourage a system be infected with more malwares (i will discuss this in our next topic on Denial of Services attacks).

To curb spams (besides offering stronger spam filtering), most Webmail service providers such as Windows Live Hotmail also provide users a "blacklisting" option in their e-mail settings , where users can include a spam e-mail in their blacklist so the account will remember the e-mail as spams next time a similar e-mail come knocking at their e-mail inbox.

Below is an illustration of how spam on Viagra operates. Spams on Rolex watches & Viagra are the most common spam contents in the U.S


2. E-mail Spoofing

E-mail spoofing is used to describe fraudulent e-mail activity in which the sender address and other parts of the e-mail header are changed to appear as though the e-mail originated from a different source. Unlike spamming, which aims to get users to pay attention to a certain advertisement and attracting them to purchase/obtain the product, E-mail spoofing is essentially "spamming of a different kind", where the intention of the spoofer is to either damage the reputation of an existing organization via destructive contents of the e-mail or to get users to reply to their account (whether with fraudulent intention or not).

It is also related to website spoofing, where it imitates a well-known website which is actually run by a third party as an intention for frauds or for general protests. To track the spoofers are no easy task; as many spammers now use special software to create random sender addresses, even if the user finds the origin of the e-mail it is unlikely that the e-mail address will be active. Even hackers use e-mail spoofing technique as a mean of concealing their identity while sending e-mail attachment containing worms to destroy as user's PC. Nowadays, it is possible that all new variants of internet worms contains elements of this technique.