Q & A: Small Business Fighting Big Spam
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Do you have any suggestions for individuals and small businesses to combat spam?
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By JENNIFER C. KERR    WASHINGTON  -- What would it take to get someone to turn in one of those spammers who send millions of unwanted e-mails? At least $100,000, the Federal Trade Commission figures...
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Think you can't afford best-of-breed spam and virus protection for your business? Here are two good reasons to think again.
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The United States tops the &quot;Dirty Dozen&quot; list of spam-producing countries released by security firm Sophos. &quot;The problem is that there is so much money to be made with spam, and it is very
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AOL is announcing a major victory in the fight against spam. According to America Online&#39;s member spam reports, the ISP achieved a 75% decline in junk e-mail sent to its members in 2004.
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By Dan Heckel, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.  Feb. 26--The e-mails I get on my office computer break down like this: 50 percent are ones I need to read and 49.99999 percent of them are spam I don't need.
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Anti-spam vendors hit back on Tuesday against analyst firm Gartner&#39;s claims that the level of spam is falling. &quot;I don&#39;t agree with it at all,&quot; said Mark Sommer, chief technology officer at MessageLabs.
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Spam makes sense. Sure, most of it reads like filthy gibberish. But the authors of this dreck are not semi-literate perverts. They're cool, rational business folk who have found a sleazy but effective way to make a buck.
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Services try different approaches to sender authentication to halt spam.
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(InfoWorld) - The trouble at Franklin D. Azar & Associates PC began with pornographic spam. Last May the Aurora, Colorado, law firm was being bombarded with offensive messages, and enough of it was seeping through the company's spam filters that employees complained to management, and IT administrator Kevin Rea was told to do something. What happened next, as detailed in federal court filings, shows how the fight against spammers can backfire. Spammers have been using increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade filters, so that over the past few years and despite predictions to the contrary, unsolicited e-mail continues to plague businesses worldwide. On the morning of May 21, Rea dialed up the spam settings on the Barracuda Spam Firewall 200 Azar & Associates was using to block unwanted mail. The changes made it harder for spam to land on the desktops of company employees but they also had one unforeseen consequence: the Barracuda Networks Inc. appliance began blocking e-mail from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising company lawyers of a May 30 hearing in a civil lawsuit. Azar & Associates lawyers blew their court date and this week the judge overseeing the matter ordered the company to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case. Rea did not return a call seeking comment on the matter. What happened to Azar & Associates is unusual, but reflects a legitimate worry for law firms. "This is an IT guy's nightmare if you work in a law firm," said Matt Kesner, chief technology officer with Fenwick & West LLP, a Bay Area law firm with about 250 attorneys. "It doesn't take a very high percentage of false positives in the anti-spam world to misidentify a crucial piece of correspondence." Fenwick & West has missed e-mailed court notices in the past, although it has not blown court dates as a consequence, Kesner said. Over the past 10 years U.S. state and federal courts have increasingly done business electronically in a move to become more efficient and more environmentally friendly. This charge has been led by the federal court system, which uses an electronic document system called Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF), in nearly 200 courts across the country. All federal bankruptcy and district courts use CM/ECF and soon it will be standard in the appellate courts, according to Richard Carelli, a spokesman with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. "You can be notified other ways, but by and large the business of law is carried on electronically, at least in the federal courts," Carelli said. Putting the federal courts, which use the uscourts.gov domain, on a "whitelist" of approved senders is one way to avoid problems receiving e-mail. In fact, the Colorado federal court judge in the Azar & Associates case criticized the law firm for not whitelisting his court's domain name. "It would have been a very simple task to whitelist the... [domain] to insure that such e-mails within this domain would always be received." The judge's order will probably end up costing Azar & Associates several thousand dollars, said Venkat Balasubramani, principal of Balasubramani Law, who has blogged about the issue. But despite the persistence of spammers, Balasubramani doesn't think that the CM/ECF system is really in any trouble. "I don't think the scourge of spam is going to hurt the viability of CM/ECF," he said. "I see this decision as a little bit of an aberration." Kesner, who was a lawyer before taking over the CTO job at Fenwick & West , points out that missed appointments happen when parties are notified by postal mail as well. He avoids whitelists because they must be manually maintained and there is the possibility for human error. But Fenwick & West IT staff uses several mail filtering systems, each considered to have a low frequency of error and they've also programmed their filters to allow more spam than other businesses because of concern over this issue. His advice for legal IT staff? "You test like crazy," he said. "And then you pray and genuflect."
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Prompted by government regulations, endless spam, and increasingly potent e-mail viruses, many enterprises are looking to tighten the cinch around messaging security.
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Legitimate mortgage lenders inadvertently support--and get tangled in--spam traps.
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Spammers may be about to get a taste of their own medicine. A British company is today launching software that it claims will allow computer users to hit back at the mass mailers who clog up our inboxes with
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Regarding the article '"Bad guys' are ahead despite fight against spam" (Dec. 6): Spam is the normal consequence of free e-mail as provided by nearly all Internet access providers. Sending a million pieces of junk e-mail is almost free for the spammer.
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Spam mail has become one of the biggest problems on the Internet; it consumes precious bandwidth, wastes computer resources, and causes huge financial losses to corporations.
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com. Spammers are trying to make their junk mail look more legit by adopting the same technologies intended to stem their message tsunamis, said a filtering firm Wednesday.
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Lycos Europe has recently joined the fight against spam by releasing a screensaver as part of its "Make Love Not Spam" campaign, which uses its participants machines to bombard websites that advertise through spam e-mails with data, effectively launching a distributed denial of service attack against them, with the intent being to push up bandwidth bills of the spammers who operate these websites.    Is this an effective new front in the battle against spam?