Fighting malware and spam

Spam

Mass unwanted email

Spam is the more widely used term for Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). Spam emails are unsolicited - the recipient does not want to receive them and has not given permission for the message to be sent to them - and are sent in bulk, to many addresses.

Spam takes a variety of forms, from simple promotional messages sent out to advertise a company's offerings, to 'pump-and-dump' campaigns trying to inflate the price of stocks and shares. Phishing scams also involve spam - emails are made to look as if they come from a bank or shop and try to trick recipients out of valuable access codes and personal details.

Malware is also often seeded via spam campaigns, either attached to mails (often the case with mass-mailer worms) or linked to from within messages.

Spam makes up a large proportion of all mail (some estimates for busy months are as high as 95% of all messages) and an unfiltered mailbox can be very difficult to manage, wasting huge amounts of user time finding their genuine emails.

Related news articles

Project Honey Pot 'celebrates' billionth spam message

Facebook about to become most phished organization.

15 December 2009

Botnets becoming more robust

Zeus botnet used Amazon's in-the-cloud service to control bots.

15 December 2009

Legal success against notorious spammers

Atkinson to pay huge fine; Ralsky to spend years in prison.

01 December 2009

VB calls for collaboration amongst anti-spam vendors

VB finds that, when it comes to spam filtering, a combined effort outperforms individual products.

30 November 2009

Webmail data leak hype deflated

Rumoured phishing explosion grabs headlines, reality much more mundane.

09 October 2009

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