How To Avoid Spam Robots

Despite the fact that Federal legislation (the CANSPAM act) made it illegal, harvesting email addresses from the web using automated robots remains alive and well.

Spammers who need fresh email addresses release software spider programs that comb the Internet and suck email addresses off Web pages, guest books, and anywhere else you might post your email address.

Once they get your email address, spammers will trade it around like 5th graders with a new pack of Pokemon cards at recess and you can expect the avalanche of email to begin flooding your inbox.

In order to combat this still rampant practice of stealing email addresses from websites and sending people email they don't want, the following tips should help protect you.

** Break It Up **

Obviously the best way to avoid getting picked up by an email harvester is not to post your email anywhere on anyone's website (including your own).

If the only way someone can get your email is if you give it to them, that creates a similar situation to operating with an unlisted phone number.

If telemarketers can't get your phone number, they can't call.

If you must post your email address, post it in a way that a robot won't recognize it as an email address. Instead of posting YOURNAME@YOURDOMAIN.COM, you can put YOURNAME (AT) YOURDOMAIN.COM and then, in parenthesis, put (replace AT with @ to email me).

Though it seems like an extra step for legitimate email, you'll find it a very effective technique.

** Use An Image **

Currently, online spiders (ANY spider, including search engines) cannot read text that appears in a graphic or picture. If you must display an email address on a page, then do it by typing your email address into your favorite graphics program and saving the image as a .gif or .jpg. Then post the image onto your web page so people can see the email, but spiders cannot. This too creates an extra step for people because they must type in your email address, but it's an effective solution if you must display an email address on your own website.

** Use An Email Form **

Another way to cut down on spam originating from your own website is simply not to display an email at all.

Instead, allow customers and prospects to contact you through a form where they fill in fields, click a button, and your website emails you their message.

A note of caution: make sure the form script you use does not keep your email address visible in the form code.

If the form code contains the email address, spam robots can find it even though you don't see it on the page.

** Make It Hard To Guess **

Sometimes you'll get unsolicited email because a spammer guessed your email address.

It's not a far stretch to imagine that someone probably has the email Jim@yourdomain.com, so spammers will do a "dictionary" attack on common usernames.

One way to defeat this is to place a "dot" (.) in your email address, such as Jim.Edwards@yourdomain.com. The dot makes it virtually impossible for spammers to guess your email address.

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Evict the Spammers from Your Inbox

Block Spam and Other Email Threats From Entering Your Gateway
Spam, commonly defined as unsolicited commercial email, is a powerful advertising channel for many products and services. As a result, spamming has become a profitable business, driven by the low cost of sending email compared to other direct marketing techniques. The high return on investment for spammers has resulted in an overwhelming volume of unwanted messages in personal and business email boxes. Consider this: Conducting a direct mail campaign costs an average of $1.39 per person, meaning that a response rate of 1 in 14 is necessary just to break even on a product with a $20 gross profit. Selling the same item via unsolicited spam email costs only $0.0004 per person, meaning that a response rate of 1 in 50,000 gets the seller back to break-even; anything above that is gravy. With profit margins like these, it’s easy to see why spammers will try anything to get past anti spam technology to deliver their messages to your inbox.

Types of Spam Threats
The recent onset of fraudulent spam variants such as phishing and spoofing pose an even greater risk than the spam volume clogging email servers. Spammers use techniques such as phishing and spoofing to fool users into opening messages that, at first glance, appear innocuous.

Phishing
Phishing is a specific type of spam message that solicits personal information from the recipient. Phishers use social engineering techniques to fool end users into believing that the message originated from a trusted sender, making these attacks especially dangerous because they often con victims into divulging social security numbers, bank account information or credit card numbers. In one six-month period from November 2003 to May 2004, phishing attacks increased in frequency by 4000%, and the trend continues upward.

An example of phishing is an email that appears to come from a bank requesting that users log into their account to update or correct personal information. When the users follow a link embedded in the email, they are redirected to a site that looks and behaves like the expected bank website. However, unbeknownst to the soon-to-be identity theft victims, the site is actually controlled by the scam artists who sent the email; any and all information entered by the victim can now be used in a variety of ways, none of them good.

Spoofing
Spoofing is a deceptive form of spam that hides the domain of the spammer or the spam’s origination point. Spammers often hijack the domains of well-known businesses or government entities to make spam filters think the communication is coming from a legitimate source.

Today’s spammers are more crafty than ever before and have begun blending elements of both phishing and spoofing into their messages, further spinning their web of deception. The toxic combination of spoofing and phishing presents a major threat that can trick most anyone into providing personal information to a stranger.

Toothless Legislation
On January 1, 2004, President Bush signed into law the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003,” or “CAN-SPAM” Act. While well intentioned, CAN-SPAM has done little or nothing to curb the flow of unwanted email. In fact, an estimated 97% of all spam email sent in 2004 violated the Act, and the United States still dwarfs other nations in terms of the origin of spam, with CipherTrust research revealing that an astonishing 56.77% of all spam comes from U.S.-based IP addresses. While CAN-SPAM was designed to decrease the overall volume of spam, the exact opposite has happened: in 2004, spam accounted for approximately 77% of all email traffic, and phishing attacks continue to increase exponentially, with studies showing an increase of 4000% from November 2003 to May 2004.

Anti Spam Software for the Desktop
The dramatic increase in spam volume has prompted a corresponding surge in stand-alone anti spam software solutions for the desktop, all with varying levels of effectiveness. Some anti spam software uses text filtering to screen incoming messages for known characteristics of spam, while other solutions rely solely on reputation systems that monitor and categorize email senders by IP address according to their sending behavior. Still other anti spam software uses “challenge/response filters” to block unapproved mail until the sender responds (manually) to a challenge email sent to their email account to verify his or her identity.

With so many different methods of filtering spam, no single software-based desktop anti spam solution is capable of effectively stopping spam before it reaches the inbox. The only way to successfully fight spam is to create an anti spam “cocktail” including reputation services, text filters, constant updates and a host of other best-of-breed spam blocking methods. Just as importantly, an effective anti spam solution should reside at the email gateway, not at the desktop. Without protection at the gateway, mail servers waste massive amounts of bandwidth and storage space processing every message, wanted or not, and end users face the unenviable task of deciding what to do with the countless spam messages that successfully reach them.

Take a Consolidated Approach to Anti Spam
Although it takes a person only a moment to process a message and identify it as spam, it is difficult to automate that human process because no single message characteristic consistently identifies spam. In fact, there are hundreds of different message characteristics that may indicate an email is spam, and an effective anti spam solution must be capable of employing multiple spam detection techniques.

In addition to effectively identifying spam, businesses must be assured that legitimate mail is not blocked in error. Even one false positive, or incorrectly blocked email, can have a significant impact on businesses today. Accurate spam blocking requires a combination of tools to examine various message criteria combined with real-time research and intelligence data.

By aggregating multiple spam detection technologies like text filtering, reputation services, traffic analysis and other best-of-breed techniques, and placing the solution at the email gateway in a hardened appliance, enterprises can retake control of the inbox.

About the author:
Paul Judge, CTO, CipherTrust, Inc. is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
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How Spammers Fool Rule-based and Signature-Based Spam Filters

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore.

Examining spam and spam-blocking technology can illuminate how this evolution is taking place and what can be done to combat spam and reclaim e-mail as the efficient, effective communication tool it was intended to be.

Heuristics (Rule-based Filtering)
One method used to combat spam is Rule-based, or Heuristic Filtering. Rule-based filters scan email content for predetermined words or phrases that may indicate a message is spam. For example, if an email administrator includes the word "sex" on a company’s rule-based list, any email containing this word will be filtered.

The major drawback of this approach is the difficulty in identifying keywords that are consistently indicative of spam. While spammers may frequently use the words “sex” and ‘Viagra” in spam emails, these words are also used in legitimate business correspondence, particularly in the healthcare industry. Additionally, spammers have learned to obfuscate suspect words by using spellings such as "S*E*X", or "VI a a GRR A".

It is impossible to develop dictionaries that identify every possible misspelling of "spammy" keywords. Additionally, because filtering for certain keywords produces large numbers of false positives, many organizations have found they cannot afford to rely solely on rule-based filters to identify spam.

Signature-Based Spam Filters
Another method used to combat spam is Signature-based Filtering. Signature-based filters examine the contents of known spam, usually derived from honey pots, or dummy email addresses set up specifically to collect spam. Once a honey pot receives a spam message, the content is examined and given a unique identifier. The unique identifier is obtained by assigning a value to each character in the email. Once all characters have been assigned a value, the values are totaled, creating the spam’s signature. The signature is added to a signature database and sent as a regular update to the email service’s subscribers. The signature is compared to every email coming in to the network and all matching messages are discarded as spam.

The benefit of signature-based filters is that they rarely produce false-positives, or legitimate email incorrectly identified as spam. The drawback of signature-based filters is that they are very easy to defeat. Because they are backward-looking, they only deal with spam that has already been sent. By the time the honey pot receives a spam message, the system assigns a signature, and the update is sent and installed on the subscribers’ network, the spammer has already sent millions of emails. A slight modification of the email message will render the existing signature useless.

Furthermore, spammers can easily evade signature-based filters by using special email software that adds random strings of content to the subject line and body of the email. Because the variable content alters the signature of each email sent by the spammer, signature-based spam filters are unable to match the email to known pieces of spam.

Developers of signature-based spam filters have learned to identify the tell-tale signs of automated random character generation. But as is often the case, spammers remain a step ahead and have developed more sophisticated methods for inserting random content. As a result, most spam continues to fool signature-based filters.

The Solution
When used individually, each anti-spam technique has been systematically overcome by spammers. Grandiose plans to rid the world of spam, such as charging a penny for each e-mail received or forcing servers to solve mathematical problems before delivering e-mail, have been proposed with few results. These schemes are not realistic and would require a large percentage of the population to adopt the same anti-spam method in order to be effective. You can learn more about the fight against spam by visiting our website at www.ciphertrust.com and downloading our whitepapers.

About the author:
Paul Judge, CTO, CipherTrust, Inc. is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.
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