WHAT DOES SPAM MEAN?

Spam refers to the use of electronic messaging systems to send out unrequested or unwanted
messages in bulk.

The difficulty with stopping spam is that the economics of it are so compelling. While most
would agree that spamming is unethical, the cost of delivering a message via spam is next to
nothing. If even a tiny percentage of targets respond, a spam campaign can be successful
economically.

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message (spam),

especially advertising, as well as sending messages repeatedly on the same site. While the
most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in
other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine
spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam,mobile phone messaging
spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile
apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat,
by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in every dish and where
patrons annoyingly chant "Spam" over and over again.

Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond
the management of their mailing lists, servers, infrastructures, IP ranges, and domain names,
and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. The costs, such as lost
productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have
been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the volume. Spamming has been the subject of
legislation in many jurisdictions.

History

The earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined) was a message
advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent
by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978. Rather than send a separate
message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl
Gartley, write a single mass email. Reaction from the net community was fiercely negative,
but the spam did generate some sales.

Spamming had been practiced as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill
their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk.

The first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and
wife team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting
to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the "Green
Card spam", after the subject line of the postings. Defiant in the face of widespread
condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were hypocrites or "zealouts", claimed
they had a free speech right to send unwanted commercial messages, and labeled their
opponents "anti-commerce radicals". The couple wrote a controversial book entitled How to
Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.

An early example of nonprofit fundraising bulk posting via Usenet also occurred in 1994 on
behalf of CitiHope, an NGO attempting to raise funds to rescue children at risk during
theBosnian War. However, as it was a violation of their terms of service, the
ISP Panix deleted all of the bulk posts from Usenet, only missing three copies[citation needed].

Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and anti-spam efforts) moved chiefly to email,
where it remains today. By 1999, Khan C. Smith, a well known hacker at the time, had begun
to commercialize the bulk email industry and rallied thousands into the business by building
more friendly bulk email software and providing internet access illegally hacked from major
ISPs such as Earthlink and Botnets.

By 2009 the majority of spam sent around the World was in the English language; spammers
began using automatic translation services to send spam in other languages.

In different media

Email

Email spam, also known as unsolicited bulk email (UBE), or junk mail, is the practice of
sending unwanted email messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities.
Spam in email started to become a problem when the Internet was opened for commercial use
in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and by 2007 it composed
some 80 to 85 percent of all e-mail, by a conservative estimate. Pressure to make email spam
illegal has resulted in legislation in some jurisdictions, but less so in others. The efforts taken
by governing bodies, security systems and email service providers seem to be helping to
reduce the volume of email spam. According to "2014 Internet Security Threat Report,
Volume 19" published by Symantec Corporation, spam volume dropped to 66% of all email
traffic.

An industry of email address harvesting is dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling
compiled databases. Some of these address-harvesting approaches rely on users not reading
the fine print of agreements, resulting in their agreeing to send messages indiscriminately to
their contacts. This is a common approach in social networking spam such as that generated
by the social networking site Quechup.

Instant messaging

Instant messaging spam makes use of instant messaging systems. Although less prevalent
than its e-mail counterpart, according to a report from Ferris Research, 500 million spam IMs
were sent in 2003, twice the level of 2002.

Newsgroup and forum

Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. Spamming of
Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. Usenet convention defines spamming as
excessive multiple posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar
messages). The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as
an objective measure of a message's "spamminess".

Forum spam is the creation of advertising messages on Internet forums. It is generally done
by automated spambots. Most forum spam consists of links to external sites, with the dual
goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as weight loss,
pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for
these commercial websites. Some of these links contain code to track the spambot's identity;
if a sale goes through, the spammer behind the spambot earns a commission.

Mobile phone

Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be
especially irritating to customers not only for the inconvenience, but also because of the fee
they may be charged per text message received in some markets. To comply with CAN-
SPAM regulations in the US, SMS messages now must provide options of HELP and STOP,
the latter to end communication with the advertiser via SMS altogether.
Despite the high number of phone users, there has not been so much phone spam, because
there is a charge for sending SMS. Recently, there are also observations of mobile phone
spam delivered via browser push notifications. These can be a result of allowing websites
which are malicious or delivering malicious ads to send a user notifications.

Social networking spam

Facebook and Twitter are not immune to messages containing spam links. Spammers hack
into accounts and send false links under the guise of a user's trusted contacts such as friends
and family. As for Twitter, spammers gain credibility by following verified accounts such as
that of Lady Gaga; when that account owner follows the spammer back, it legitimizes the
spammer. Twitter has studied what interest structures allow their users to receive interesting
tweets and avoid spam, despite the site using the broadcast model, in which all tweets from a
user are broadcast to all followers of the user. Spammers, out of malicious intent, post either
unwanted (or irrelevant) information or spread misinformation on social media platforms.

Social spam

Spreading beyond the centrally managed social networking platforms, user-generated content
increasingly appears on business, government, and nonprofit websites worldwide. Fake
accounts and comments planted by computers programmed to issue social spam can infiltrate
these websites.

Online game messaging

Many online games allow players to contact each other via player-to-player messaging, chat
rooms, or public discussion areas. What qualifies as spam varies from game to game, but
usually this term applies to all forms of message flooding, violating the terms of service
contract for the website. This is particularly common in MMORPGs where the spammers are
trying to sell game-related "items" for real-world money, chiefly among them being in-game
currency. In gameplay terms, spamming also refers to the repetitive use of the same combat
skills as a cheap tactic (e.g. "to defeat the blue dragon, just spam fireballs").

On Wikipedia

Wikipedia has become a major target for insertion of link spam which means inserting of
commercial links as references into articles which is against Wikipedia rules. In 2007 all
outgoing links on Wikipedia were coded "nofollow" so they are not considered by the
automatic programmes which prepare the ranking in searches of google or other search
engines. Nevertheless, attempts to place commercial links in Wikipedia continue and some
editors work to combat the practice.

Blog, wiki, and guestbook

Blog spam is spamming on weblogs. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open
nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments
to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial
web site. Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks, both of which
accept user contributions. Another possible form of spam in blogs is the spamming of a
certain tag on websites such as Tumblr.

Spam targeting video sharing sites

Video sharing sites, such as YouTube, are now frequently targeted by spammers. The most
common technique involves spammers (or spambots) posting links to sites, on the comments
section of random videos or user profiles. With the addition of a "thumbs up/thumbs down"
feature, groups of spambots may constantly "thumbs up" a comment, getting it into the top
comments section and making the message more visible.

Yet another kind is actual video spam, giving the uploaded movie a name and description
with a popular figure or event that is likely to draw attention, or within the video has a certain
image timed to come up as the video's thumbnail image to mislead the viewer, such as a still
image from a feature film, purporting to be a part-by-part piece of a movie being pirated,
e.g. Big Buck Bunny Full Movie Online - Part 1/10 HD, a link to a supposed keygen, trainer,
ISO file for a video game, or something similar. The actual content of the video ends up
being totally unrelated, a Rickroll, offensive, or simply on-screen text of a link to the site
being promoted. In some cases, the link in question may lead to an online survey site, a
password-protected archive file with instructions leading to the aforementioned survey
(though the survey, and the archive file itself, is worthless and doesn't contain the file in
question at all), or in extreme cases, malware. Others may upload videos presented in
an infomercial-like format selling their product which feature actors and paid testimonials,
though the promoted product or service is of dubious quality and would likely not pass the
scrutiny of a standards and practices department at a television station or cable network.
General costs

In all cases listed above, including both commercial and non-commercial, "spam happens"
because of a positive cost-benefit analysis result; if the cost to recipients is excluded as
anexternality the spammer can avoid paying.

Cost is the combination of

 Overhead: The costs and overhead of electronic spamming include bandwidth,

developing or acquiring an email/wiki/blog spam tool, taking over or acquiring a
host/zombie, etc.
 Transaction cost: The incremental cost of contacting each additional recipient once a
method of spamming is constructed, multiplied by the number of recipients
(see CAPTCHA as a method of increasing transaction costs).
 Risks: Chance and severity of legal and/or public reactions,
including damages and punitive damages.
 Damage: Impact on the community and/or communication channels being spammed
(see Newsgroup spam).

Benefit is the total expected profit from spam, which may include any combination of the
commercial and non-commercial reasons listed above. It is normally linear, based on the
incremental benefit of reaching each additional spam recipient, combined with the conversion
rate. The conversion rate for botnet-generated spam has recently been measured to be around
one in 12,000,000 for pharmaceutical spam and one in 200,000 for infection sites as used by
the Storm botnet. The authors of the study calculating those conversion rates noted, "After 26
days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted."

In crime

Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The
objective may be identity theft, or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to
capitalize on human greed, while some attempts to take advantage of the victims'
inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing).

On May 31, 2007, one of the world's most prolific spammers, Robert Alan Soloway, was
arrested by US authorities. Described as one of the top ten spammers in the world, Soloway
was charged with 35 criminal counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud,
aggravated identity theft, and money laundering. Prosecutors allege that Soloway used
millions of "zombie" computers to distribute spam during 2003. This is the first case in which
US prosecutors used identity theft laws to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone
else's Internet domain name.

In an attempt to assess potential legal and technical strategies for stopping illegal spam, a
study cataloged three months of online spam data and researched website naming and hosting
infrastructures. The study concluded that: 1) half of all spam programs have their domains
and servers distributed over just eight percent or fewer of the total available hosting registrars
and autonomous systems, with 80 percent of spam programs overall being distributed over
just 20 percent of all registrars and autonomous systems; 2) of the 76 purchases for which the
researchers received transaction information, there were only 13 distinct banks acting as
credit card acquirers and only three banks provided the payment servicing for 95 percent of
the spam-advertised goods in the study; and, 3) a "financial blacklist" of banking entities that
do business with spammers would dramatically reduce monetization of unwanted e-mails.
Moreover, this blacklist could be updated far more rapidly than spammers could acquire new
banking resources, an asymmetry favoring anti-spam efforts.

Political issues

An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and
the American Civil Liberties Union has to do with so-called "stealth blocking", a term for
ISPs employing aggressive spam blocking without their users' knowledge. These groups'
concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to reduce spam-related costs may select tools that
(either through error or design) also block non-spam e-mail from sites seen as "spam-
friendly". Few object to the existence of these tools; it is their use in filtering the mail of users
who are not informed of their use that draws fire.

Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat some spam as unlawful merely by
applying existing laws against trespass and conversion, some laws specifically targeting spam
have been proposed. In 2004, United States passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 that
provided ISPs with tools to combat spam. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric
Head who settled the lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004. But the law is
criticized by many for not being effective enough. Indeed, the law was supported by some
spammers and organizations that support spamming, and opposed by many in the anti-spam
community
 5 COMMON TYPES OF SPAM

1. Comment Spam
2. Trackback Spam
3. Negative SEO Attack
4. Spiders, Bots and DDoS Attacks
5. E-mail Spam

If you’ve been in business for a while, then you’ve probably dealt with it already. However,
if you’re just starting out, you probably have a lot of things on your mind. Protection against
spam might get overlooked. It might not be a big problem at first, but it can get pretty bad if
left unattended.

What Is SPAM and Why Does It Exist?

There are two definitions for SPAM:

1. A tinned meat product made mainly from ham.

2. Irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of
users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.

Both these definitions are accurate. But why did I cover them both? Well, just as a fun fact.
Internet SPAM actually gets its name from the canned meat brand called SPAM. SPAM cans
we’re very popular and would often take up large spaces in stores. You could find them
everywhere in very large quantities.

When internet mass messaging started to arise, the name SPAM was mentioned somewhere
on a forum. It stuck with it and the phenomenon eventually got more popular than the canned
food itself. Today, ask someone if they know what SPAM is and they will probably refer to it
as unsolicited messages over the internet.
In the early days of the internet, SPAM was usually limited to e-mails but, over the years,
internet SPAM has evolved. So why do people use SPAM as a marketing method? Well… in
short, because it works. It’s becoming harder to do it because of filters and advanced
technology, but it still works. Cold selling is still very effective. If you’ve watched Wolf of
the Wall Street then you know how this works.

The difference was that Jordan Belford was cold calling people he knew were interested in
stocks. A spammer often doesn’t care about that. They just collect a huge number of e-mails
and then blast them with any offer they have. Not once, but continuously.

In SEO, SPAM is usually a byproduct of BlackHat SEO. In order to promote their offers,
spammers use techniques like keyword stuffing and article spinning (automatic rewriting of
content, using software) as well as automatic link building. You should never engage in such
techniques, as it could harm your business and even bring legal issues.

However, this article isn’t about what you shouldn’t be doing, but about how to protect
yourself when others try to do shady things. Although spam and scam have many things in
common, we’re not going to cover the ‘business’ types behind SPAM, but the methods used
to do it.

These being said, here are 5 of the most common methods spammers use and how you can
effectively protect yourself against them.

1. Comment Spam

Comment spam is awful. If you get hit by one of these, you’ll be annoyed.
The spammer uses software, such as ScrapeBox, to find potential targets and blasts them with
comments. The comments are useless to the victim, but create blacklinks to the spammer’s
website.

You might think that removing the possibility of adding links will discourage spammers to
target your website. However, this is rarely the case, since most spammers don’t spend too
much time checking these things. They just blast everything in their way, as long as they’re
related to their niche.

Have a glimpse at the website below. This is what happened because I forgot to protect from
comment spam and left unmonitored for a while:
 The spam above resulted the my server getting slow and Google banning my IP for
Gmail. That’s actually how I found out about the SPAM. The WordPress notifications were
so many in such a short time that Google sent them directly in the Spam section, so I didn’t
notice them until I couldn’t send any e-mails at all through my business addresses.

The mistake: Not using a Captcha. I used this WordPress plugin to remove all comments at
once. Manually deleting them would’ve taken months. If you’re on another popular platform
or CMS (Content Management System), I’m sure you can find similar plugins by searching
Google.

Solution #1. I added a Google Recaptcha plugin on every other section of the website,
login page, contact forms, etc. You can use any captcha plugin, but note that there are
software out there that can solve these automatically. Spammers even use human Captcha
solving farms from developing countries.

Solution #2. Activate the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin. It comes pre-installed with
WordPress, it’s easy to set up and it’s very effective. Again, similar plugins should be
available for other platforms. You should be safe to autoapprove comments with this plugin
installed. However, I recommend that you spend some time each week manually approving
comments.

In the end, I removed the comments section altogether, since I don’t really need it on that
website. But that’s not the best solution. It might sometimes be a fit but, in general,
comments are very useful for SEO. Even 1 year after the publication of some content, if it’s
evergreen, comments will start rolling in. This will constantly update your page and we all
know Google likes fresh content that keeps getting updated.

You can also force users to log in if they want to comment on your blog. However, this
discourages even real users from commenting so it can harm you as well. It’s good however
for an eCommerce store, where you mostly want clients to be commenting on your products.
2. Trackback Spam

Trackbacks were created with the intention of being useful. In a way, they are. Their purpose
is to notify the webmaster of new backlinks by creating a link back to the source of the
backlink.

In other words, when someone links to you, your website generates a link back to them. This
way, you can notice it and quickly establish a connection with the webmasters that mentioned
you. This helps a lot with further promotion.

However, spammers quickly noticed that they can easily profit from this.

The mistake: If trackbacks are left unmonitored, spammers can create links to your
website from their website. Your website will then respond with a trackback. After the
trackback is live, they remove the link to your website, making it look like you’re the one
linking to them.

3. Negative SEO Attack

A negative SEO Attack is a type of SPAM that can really harm you and your business. It’s
purpose is to make Google think that you’re the one performing BlackHat SEO tactics. It’s
usually the work of nasty competitors trying to pull you down instead of lifting them
up. Negative SEO can take many forms, like hacking a website, but we will be talking
about mass link building.

Although Google said that Penguin 4.0 acts in real time and will ignore spammy links, such
as the ones created by Negative SEO Attacks, the truth is that Negative SEO Attacks are still
effective.

cognitiveSEO clients commonly use the toolset after a sudden drop in rankings. Many times,
they spot massive amounts of spammy and irrelevant links built in a short amount of time,
obviously, not by them. Their backlink profile looks something like this:
4. Spiders, Bots and DDoS Attacks

Bots and Spiders come to your website for various reasons. It’s either a search engine
crawler, or a tool trying to get information from your website, such as what sites you’re
linking to (wink wink). Although they aren’t generally harmful, people can use them to
overload your server’s bandwidth, firewall or CPU.

This type of attack is called a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Attack and it’s pretty
much just a very large amount of fake traffic being sent to your website in a short amount of
time.

Mistake: Again, there is no obvious mistake here except for not keeping an eye on your
website.

Solution#1: The first thing you can do to protect yourself is to install a really good
WordPress security plugin (like WordFence, for instance). This will usually protect your
website from most harmful things, such as brute force attacks, malware or any other hack
attempts.
5. E-mail Spam

E-mail Spam is really hard to fight against. If your e-mail gets on the hands of just one mass
spammer, it’s pretty much compromised. Luckily for us, Google does a pretty good job at
differentiating spam from real, useful e-mails.

However, there’s a downside. Most of the times, there’s a higher chance of important e-mails
getting into the Spam folder, than spam e-mails getting into the inbox. I’m not sure if I
preferred it the other way or which one would be better.
Anti-SPAM Golden Rules

Before you go, let’s recap some of the most important things that you should do and
shouldn’t do in order to protect yourself from SPAM:
Always use Captcha: Captcha is the first line of defense against SPAM in any
circumstances. Without it, any bot or software can easily post something on your website. If
your website is crawlable and indexed by Google, make sure you have some sort of Captcha
installed on your forms, login pages and comment sections.
 ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE OF SPAM

The benefits of spam

When I was in a band, I unashamedly used various mediums (email, Facebook, Twitter,
MySpace) to send potential listeners messages containing or about my music.

This helped to get more people listening to my music, and also made sure the band met the
minimum attendance targets whenever we were playing live.

Believe it or not, most London gig venues will refuse to re-book a band unless its members
bring at least 40 people along with them. As a result - unless you have 40+ friends who are
willing to hop on a bus to King's Cross on a rainy Wednesday night - this can be a big hurdle
that prevents bands from getting enough bookings.
Luckily, my band was able to reach much larger audiences through the medium of the Web.

I know that some of the people I emailed or messaged probably didn't even bother to read my
event invitation before sending it straight to their virtual trash-cans, but some people did take
the time to check us out - and that's the point of spam!
Companies use spam in much the same way (although often on a far larger scale).

The disadvantages of spam

Spam is annoying. If you've ever had to go through your email account, weeding out the
relevant emails from the junk messages selling miracle hair growth lotions, free subscriptions
to dating websites, and overnight penis enlargement then you'll know exactly what I mean!

Spam also risks severely damaging an internet company's reputation.

For example, if every time you logged on to a certain social media website you ended up
being inundated with spam, it wouldn't be too long before you'd start looking for a new site to
connect with your friends and family on - without the hassle of being targeted by spammers.
 CONCLUSION
For many companies and individuals, spam is an annoyance and undesired expense. Many
products and services are available to help avoid spam. Only by using these tools can we help
to stem the tide of the ever-increasing unsolicited e-mails that reach our inboxes every day. If
companies with which you do business send you spam, make them stop. Support programs
such as the Trusted Sender Program and efforts from companies such as the SpamCon
Foundation to assist antispammers.

If you are a solution provider or developer, create e-mail-friendly solutions. Make sure you
give customers an easy way to manage e-mails from you. Register with companies that may
mistakenly tag your e-mails as spam.
 REFERENCES

https://www.time-management-success.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-email.html

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1716/spam

https://technology.blurtit.com/1069481/what-is-the-advantage-and-disadvantage-of-spam