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Information Security Management May 2014
Computer SPAM; The Impact of Unsolicited Email
on Information Security
Mahmood H. Shubbak
May 2014
Author Note
- Words in italics are explained in the Glossary at the end of this research paper.
Table of Contents
Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 2
What is Spam?.......................................................................................................................... 2
Spam Types............................................................................................................................... 3
Statistics and Figures ............................................................................................................... 4
Spam Volume......................................................................................................................... 4
Spam Sources and Themes .................................................................................................... 5
Driving Factors......................................................................................................................... 6
Email Addresses Harvesting ................................................................................................... 8
Spam Impact............................................................................................................................. 8
Legal Aspects ............................................................................................................................ 9
Reduction Methods ................................................................................................................ 10
Users Level .......................................................................................................................... 10
Email Providers Level.......................................................................................................... 11
Spamming Botnets Takedown ............................................................................................. 11
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 12
Glossary .................................................................................................................................. 13
References ............................................................................................................................... 14
Figures
Figure 1: Screenshot of mail inbox full of Spam (HBE, 2008) ................................................. 2
Figure 2: CryptoLocker; example of spam-transmitted malware (Cisco, 2014) ....................... 3
Figure 3: Spam percentage of overall email traffic in 2013 ...................................................... 4
Figure 4: The volume of Spam in global email traffic in 2013 (SIO, 2014) ............................. 4
Figure 5: Advertising percentage in Media ............................................................................... 5
Figure 6: The top ten global spam origins and languages (Cisco, 2013) ................................... 5
Figure 7: The top themes for spam messages worldwide in 2013 (Cisco, 2014) ...................... 6
Figure 8: The parasitic economics of spam (Cobb, 2003) ......................................................... 7
Figure 9: The percentage of the blocked, filtered, and delivered messages by Microsoft ..... 11
Tables
Table 1: Comparison between different advertisement methods (Boehme & Holz, 2006) ....... 6
Table 2: Spam Reduction Methods Summary ......................................................................... 12
Spam and Information Security Mahmood Shubbak
Spring 2014 1
Abstract
Spam, or the unsolicited email messages are widely considered as risk on information
security of both individual and businesses. It wastes users’ time, reduces their productivity
and costs organisations huge amount of money on storage units and spam filters. It also might
incorporate with various types of fraud, data phishing, and malware. Moreover, spam costs
the email service providers an extreme unnecessary share of the global email traffic. In this
research paper, a brief explanation of the spam problem, its types, and statistics on its global
volume, sources and themes are provided. In addition, the economical driving factors for
spammers, their methods in collecting valid email addresses and building Botnets, as well as
the negative impact of their activities are explained in the second part of this paper. In the last
part, an overview of the regulating laws in the United Kingdom; the Privacy and Electronic
Communications Regulations 2003, and the United States of America; the CAN-SPAM 2003
act, as well as the commonly used reduction methods by the email providers’ servers, and
best practice instructions for users to mitigate the spam risk on their information security.
Keywords: Spam; Junk mail; Malware; Impact; Information Security; Legal aspects
Spam and Information Security Mahmood Shubbak
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Computer SPAM; The Impact of Unsolicited Email
on Information Security
Mahmood H. Shubbak
Cardiff Metropolitan University
Introduction
With the widespread use of electronic means for communication and data transmission over
the Internet, many new types of risks on information security have appeared, such as
information stealing, fraud, computer viruses, as well as the unsolicited email messages;
Spam.
In this research paper, a brief explanation of spam, its types, sources, global volume, and
economics, as well as spamming methods, laws and regulations are introduced, followed by
an overview of the commonly used reduction methods and some advices for users and
enterprises on how to protect their information security from this risk.
What is Spam?
The terms spam, junk mail, or unsolicited bulk email are usually used to describe the practice
of sending commercial email messages blindly to a huge group of people without consent
(Encarta, 2008). The identity and address of spam sender are usually concealed (SpamLaws,
2010) while the sender generally does not target recipients personally (ICO, 2014).
Spam emails are usually sent for advertisement and commercial purposes. However, they are
sometimes used for phishing recipients’ personal and financial details, or might involve some
kinds of viruses and other malware infection. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of email inbox full
of spam messages (HBE, 2008).
Figure 1: Screenshot of mail inbox full of Spam (HBE, 2008)
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Beyond email environment, spam can be found in most, if not all, electronic communication
and sharing methods; such as instant messaging, mobile phone text messages, forums,
newsgroups, blog comments, online gaming, as well as social networking.
Spam is widely considered as a serious problem; besides wasting people's time and efforts
dealing with unwanted messages, spam also consumes a huge share in the global network
bandwidth (Stroud, 2006). Moreover, fraud, data phishing and other cybercrime activities,
associated with it, can form a huge risk.
Spam Types
Based on their purpose, spam emails can be categorized into two main types; advertising and
fraud. While most spam messages are for commercial purposes of advertising and promoting
various kinds of goods and services, some bulk mailings are completely fraud; such as asking
the recipient to provide personal or bank account details, or to download programs or
software tools that comprise some kind of malware, or sometimes by forwarding him/her to
an infected link. This type of spam is usually called ‘scam’ (Kaspersky, 2010).
An example of a ‘spam-transmitted malware’ is the ransomware Trojan; CryptoLocker,
which infected many computers in the fall of 2013. Disguised as a legitimate email
attachment, CryptoLocker began encrypting victims’ files with a combination of RSA 2048-
bit key pairs and AES-256, considered unfeasible to break, asking victims to pay amounts of
money within specific time, to avoid losing their data forever. As shown in Figure 2 (Cisco,
2014).
Figure 2: CryptoLocker; example of spam-transmitted malware (Cisco, 2014)
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Statistics and Figures
Spam Volume
Starting since the release of the electronic mail services for the general public in early 1990s,
the spam problem has grown exponentially over years. According to Cisco Security
Intelligence Operations SIO 85.6% of the global email traffic in 2013 was spam; with
average volume of 106 Billion spam emails daily, comparing to 17.7 Billion daily legitimate
emails in the same year. As shown in figures 3 and 4 (SIO, 2014).
Figure 3: Spam percentage of overall email traffic in 2013
Figure 4: The volume of Spam in global email traffic in 2013 (SIO, 2014)
To understand the size of the problem, let’s compare these statistics to the advertising overall
average in other printed, audio, and visual media. Figures from United States and United
Kingdom will be used here as examples. The Independent regulator and competition
authority for the UK communications industries (Ofcom) determined the Allowances for
advertising and teleshopping for audio-visual media not to exceed a limit of 7 minutes per
hour on public service channels (11.7% of the overall broadcasting), and 12 minutes per hour
on other channels (20%). (Ofcom, 2010). Furthermore, in the written media, 20 to 25% of the
daily newspapers pages in the USA fall into the ‘Advertising only’ category (RI, 2001).
Spam 85.66%
Legitimate Email 14.33%
Malware 0.01%
Glo
bal
Em
ail
Vo
lum
e in
Bil
lio
ns
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Figure 5: Advertising percentage in Media
Spam Sources and Themes
This huge volume of spam messages is sent daily from all over the world. In 2012, India were
recorded as the top source of spam globally, with a share of 12.3%, the United States of
America came second with a share of 11.4% of the global spam. Figure 6 below shows the
top ten global spam origins, and languages, as stated in the 2013 Cisco Annual Security
Report (Cisco, 2013).
Figure 6: The top ten global spam origins and languages (Cisco, 2013)
Bank details phishing, commercial advertisements, and online dating were the most used
themes in spamming in 2013. However, spammers recently start to use topics related to the
social media networking because of its growing popularity among email users. Figure 7
below shows the top themes for spam messages worldwide, according to Cisco Annual
Security Report (Cisco, 2014).
0.00% 20.00% 40.00% 60.00% 80.00% 100.00%
TV public channels
Other TV channels
Daily Newspapers
Spam Email
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Figure 7: The top themes for spam messages worldwide in 2013 (Cisco, 2014)
Spamming process involves three main parties; the spammer, the email delivery service
provider, and the recipient. In the following sections, the motivations and impact on each
party of those will be discussed from an information security point of view.
Driving Factors
In their paper, (Boehme & Holz, 2006) refers to an interesting comparison between different
advertisement methods in terms of their cost and associated number of recipients. It shows
that spam has the least cost per recipient of only $0.0005, which is 70 times less than online
advertisements. As shown in Table 1 below.
Table 1: Comparison between different advertisement methods (Boehme & Holz, 2006)
Total cost Number of recipients Cost per recipient
Direct mail $ 9,700 7,000 $ 1.39
Telemarketing $ 160 240 $ 0.66
Print – targeted $ 7,500 100,000 $ 0.075
Print – general $ 30,000 442,000 $ 0.067
Fax $ 30 600 $ 0.05
Online ads $ 35 1,000 $ 0.035
Spam $ 250 500,000 $ 0.0005
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In light of these figures, it becomes clear why there are huge amounts of spam emails
generated and delivered daily. It is “the parasitic economics of spam” (Cobb, 2003); while the
cost per message decline rapidly with volume for spammers who use cheap or sometimes free
tools, the case is totally the opposite for recipients who need more time, mailbox capacity,
and effort for processing these loads of junk mails. As shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8: The parasitic economics of spam (Cobb, 2003)
Furthermore, the free nature of most email services attracts scammers to upload and distribute
their viruses and all other kinds of malware, and carry out their phishing and fraud activities
as well.
In both cases; advertising spamming and scamming, “the cost per transmission to the
spammer is so low that a tiny success rate is acceptable” (Anderson & Moore, 2008), even “a
return rate as low as 0.001% can be profitable” (Cobb, 2003), which means that making only
one successful commercial deal out of 100,000 spam email messages sent, can still be
considered profitable.
As an example of the revenue that the first type spammers, marketers, can gain; in one case, a
mailing of 3.5 million messages resulted in 81 sales in one week. For each sale, the marketing
company got $19 as commissions, which equals a net revenue of $1,555 against a very low
sending costs; less than $300 (Mangalindan, 2002).
When it comes to Scammers, the second type of spammers, huge profits are made by
breaking the law and lying on customers about fake services or products. In his paper (Cobb,
2003) referred to Arizona company that used to buy ‘herbal’ pills at $2.50 per bottle and
resell them via email for $59.95, under misleading label. “When the company was busted by
the State Attorney General, the seized profits included nearly $3 million in cash; a large
amount of expensive jewellery; more than $20 million in bank accounts; 12 luxury imported
automobiles (including 8 Mercedes plus assorted models from Lamborghini, Rolls Royce,
Ferrari and Bentley); an office building; and assorted luxury real estate in Paradise Valley
and Scottsdale”.
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Email Addresses Harvesting
Spammers use many ways to collect valid email addresses, in his paper (Brain, 2010)
mentioned many of these ways such as:
1. Newsgroups, Chat Rooms, and social networking sites (Polakis, et al., 2010).
2. Searching the Web for the ‘@’ symbol that indicates email addresses. Such kind of search
engine programs are often called ‘spambots’. Business addresses are more likely to be
collected by this method since they are usually shown directly in the enterprises’
websites.
3. Carrying out a dictionary search of the email servers of large hosting companies, starting
with a known address and randomly generate addresses by slight changing it, and test
their availability.
4. Websites that are specifically created to attract email addresses using various methods
and claims such as asking users to enter their email addresses to get some documents,
newsletters, or to get registered for a prize draw.
5. Or, in the past, by buying email addresses lists of other sites’ users.
Spam Impact
On the other hand, spam has a negative impact on the recipients and the email delivery
network as well (Bauer, et al., 2008);
1. Spam costs recipients effort and time for processing or even deleting it from their mail
inboxes. This might lead to reducing the employees’ productivity and wasting some of
their working time for purposes beyond their main job duties. (NR, 2003) shows that
spam costs the average organization about 1.4% of employee productivity, for about 6.5
minutes daily wasted. In estimation back in 2003, spam globally cost $20 billion in lost
productivity (Lyman, 2003).
2. Spam can contain some embarrassing, offensive, or inappropriate content.
3. With email inbox full of unsolicited messages, it becomes difficult to recognise the
legitimate emails. Some important messages might get lost or accidentally deleted.
4. As many spam messages are aimed for fraud or illegal goods promotion, recipients might,
by responding to it, lose their money in fake commercial operations.
5. Recipients might also encounter personal and financial details phishing attacks that also
might cause them financial losses.
6. Besides to its financial harm, spam transmitted spyware also involves large risk on
recipients’ privacy.
7. Some spam contains viruses and other malware that can damage the recipients’ systems.
The loss becomes more severe when enterprises systems are infected by them; such harm
is not only in terms of systems hardware or software, but also it might affect their service
delivery time for customers, which can directly affect their reputation. Moreover, this
damage might cause data loss, which certainly cost much money.
8. These risks lead business organisations to use some security systems, anti-malware, spam
filters, as well as additional storage units, which can be considered as additional costs.
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9. On the other hand, spam consumes high portion of the global email traffic, costing the
email delivery networks and servers a lot of power and storage space for transferring and
storing unsolicited data; which reducing their efficiency.
10. Also on email service providers, spam has negative effects on their reputation, users’
confidence, and quality of service.
In 2007, Ferris Research, a web security research company in California, estimated the global
cost of spam at US$ 100 billion (SPAMfighter, 2008).
Legal Aspects
In light of the previously mentioned cost that spam has on both recipients and email servers,
lawmakers have made laws and regulations that control the email communication processes,
and prevent unsolicited mailing activities.
In this section, two laws will be discussed briefly; the CAN-SPAM 2003 act in the United
States of America, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 in the
United Kingdom.
CAN-SPAM, stands for ‘Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and
Marketing’, were signed by the American president in December 2003, and put into action in
2004. The law contains many terms for online marketers to abide by when sending emails for
commercial purposes, the list below summarises these main requirements (Jennings, 2004):
- It prevents senders from using fraudulent transmission data or misleading sender or
subject lines.
- Senders should add their valid postal address to each email.
- Email lists should be ‘opt-in’, i.e. the acceptance of recipients for their addresses to be
added to the list is required, otherwise, the emails should “include a clear notice that
states the email is an advertisement or solicitation in commercial messages” (USA, 2003)
- Every email should include a "clear and conspicuous" unsubscribe mechanism ‘opt-out’.
- Senders should have a process for handling unsubscribes within the 10-day window.
- Senders are prevented from sharing the address of their subscribed persons with any third
party without their permission.
- Email addresses harvesting as well as randomly addresses generators are forbidden.
- The subject line should readily identify the message content.
The CAN-SPAM Act involves penalties of fine, imprisonment for no more than 5 years, or
both, for particular offenses.
Containing very similar terms, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations
PECR, approved by the UK parliament in December 2003, goes a step further by requiring
organisations to only send marketing emails to individuals who “have agreed to receive them,
except where there is a clearly defined customer relationship” (ICO, 2014). The full text of
these regulations can be found in the UK legislation archive website (UK, 2003).
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However, it is worth mentioning here that since a lot of spam comes from overseas, such
national legislations are not capable, alone, of completely eliminating the spam problem.
Reduction Methods
Analysing the ‘parasitic economics’ model of spam, the immediate suggestion for eliminating
spam might be to charge some fees for sending email messages. However, such a solution is
very difficult to be applied for many reasons. First, there are many email service providers
around the web, such as Yahoo and Gmail, depend on their free email services to attract
users, while making profit from selling online advertisements. In other words, the economic
system for these businesses is built on the free services, so changing this system by charging
fees per email message is not a simple matter. Moreover, this solution might have a negative
effect on the email usage volume around the world, Emails might be less used, and online
communicating will become difficult.
To reduce the amount of spam emails, many methods are used both at the users’ practice
level and the email providers level, as follows:
Users Level
Email security experts advise users to adhere to ‘best’ practice, that can help in reducing the
amount of unsolicited email messages they receive (ICO, 2014), such as:
- To be careful with whom you share your email address.
- To have separate personal and business email addresses.
- Not to put your email addresses directly on internet webpages, and -when necessary- to
put it not as a text but as an image, or to write it without the ‘@’ symbol; e.g.
person(at)example.com instead of [email protected].
- To check privacy policies when subscribing in marketing websites or newsletters.
- To check for the ‘opt-out’ option and use it to unsubscribe.
- When there is no ‘opt-out’ option available, avoid responding to spam emails, since
replying indicates that your email address is active.
- Never to click on the hyperlinks, images, or any adverts in spam emails, and don’t
download the attached files if any.
- To use a spam filter on your computer, or check that such filters are used by your email
service provider.
- To keep your systems well maintained and up to date.
- To make sure that you have up-to-date anti-virus software.
- To move any unsolicited messages to the spam (sometimes called bulk or junk) folder.
This can help your email provider to identify spam sources and update their filters, i.e.
prevent these messages from reach your inbox again.
- For enterprises, to develop an internal code of conducts that prevents the employees from
using their business email addresses for personal or online shopping purposes. And also
to use internal spam filters on their servers and networks. “Companywide spam filters
reduce the productivity loss from spam by 26%” (NR, 2003).
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Email Providers Level
Email service providers usually use specific filtering systems and techniques to detect and
block spam. Some filters scan the content of messages and their subjects in order to filter the
spam out. Others rely on blocking email messages from the ‘bad addresses’ lists; senders
from whom a lot of messages were reported as spam (Cobb, 2003).
Another approach that is used in Microsoft Outlook email systems is to put limits on the
volume and type of email that users can send (Outlook, 2012). These limits are on the daily
allowed number of messages that user can send, as well as the number of recipients for each
message. Moreover, Outlook introduces a reputation score for each email account, which is
related proportionally to the user’s volume limits.
The data shown in the following graph were collected from multiple editions of the Microsoft
Security Intelligence Report in the period from 2006 to 2014 (Microsoft, 2014). It shows the
percentage of the blocked (not delivered), filtered (to the junk email folder), and delivered
messages by Microsoft email services in the period from the first half of 2006 (1H06) to the
first half of 2013 (1H13).
Figure 9: The percentage of the blocked, filtered, and delivered messages by Microsoft
Spamming Botnets Takedown
The final effective method in fighting spam, is the takedown of the spammers botnets; i.e.
closing the spam sources. As shown in the previous figure 9, the amount of spam was
decreased significantly in 2011, because of the successful takedowns of a number of large
spam-sending botnets; Cutwail in August 2010 and Rustock in March 2011(Microsoft, 2014).
Table 2 below summarises the main spamming activities and the corresponding used methods
for reducing them.
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Delivered
Filtered
Blocked
Spam and Information Security Mahmood Shubbak
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Table 2: Spam Reduction Methods Summary
Reduction Methods
Bes
t P
ract
ice
Dis
gu
isin
g
Ad
dre
sses
Sp
am
Fil
ters
An
tim
alw
are
Blo
ckin
g
Vo
lum
e
Da
ily
Lim
its
Rec
ipie
nts
Lim
its
Rep
uta
tio
n
Sco
re
Sp
amm
ing
Act
ivit
ies Collecting Email Addresses
Sending to many Addresses
High Rate Message Sending
Fraud and Phishing
Malware Attachments
Infected Links
Conclusion
When I have started with this research two weeks ago, the counter of spam comments in my
‘under-construction’ website (shubbakom.wordpress.com) stated that Akismet; a spam
filtering software, has protected my site from 42 spam comments. The counter has reached
249 now.
No matter how hard we try to reduce them, it must be admitted that the issue of junk emails
cannot be totally eliminated, at least in the near future. However, seeing the full half of the
glass, it is obvious that spam as all other cybercrime means has helped, in a way or another,
in creating smart filtering algorithms, developing the information security systems,
discovering and solving many bugs in the electronic communication systems.
Paper Statistics
Word Count: 3,153 Number of References: 26
Number of Pages: 15
Spam and Information Security Mahmood Shubbak
Spring 2014 13
Glossary
Botnet: a large number of compromised computers that are controlled by a third party in order to
perform tasks; (is usually used for transmitting malware or spam, or to launch attacks).
Cybercrime: criminal activities carried out by means of computers or the Internet, such as
fraud, viruses and malware.
Malware: short for malicious software, is software that is intended to disrupt computer
operation, steal information, or damage computer systems, such as viruses, spyware, and
Trojan.
Opt-in: choose to participate in something. Usually used for subscribing email address into
newsletters and marketing lists.
Opt-out: choose not to participate or continue in something. Usually used for unsubscribing
from newsletters or marketing mailing lists.
Phishing: the fraudulent attempts to make individuals reveal their personal or financial
information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.
Ransomware: a type of malware designed to restrict access to a computer system until a
specific sum of money is paid.
Spyware: a type of malware that is used for spying; gathering others’ information without
their permission or knowledge.
Trojan: a type of malware that appears as a legitimate computer program or tool. However,
it performs or facilitates some criminal activity when it is run.
Spam and Information Security Mahmood Shubbak
Spring 2014 14
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