GeekPolice Tech

Not sure how long you have been on the Internet, but I remember the 1990s and early 2000s when spam was already severe. Spam is the shameless plugs made by companies in order to gain an illegal advantage in advertising. Most spam is considered negative, and can really deteriorate certain websites.



There are three types of common spam:

1. Email spam, junk email, and social engineered email.

-Email spam is what most people know about. It just floods an inbox like a plague does a living body. For the non-savvy email user, spam is constant. For the savvy email user, these folks get 1-2 spam emails a day and their inbox is always clean.

-Junk email is like spam email, except this is just email sent from useless mailing lists, that you accidentally joined by submitting an email address to a survey site, mailing list, or other website.

Social engineered email is the most common infectious email. The attacker will usually fetch a long list of emails from the Internet by using a bot. This bot searches sites for email addresses, then indexes them. Once indexed, the email message containing the virus code is sent to all the indexed email addresses. When the email is opened by the user, one of two things might happen: A.) They get instantly infected. B.) They get invited to a website that appears to look safe in the email, but will infect the computer once the user goes to it. Frequently, this is the invitation to a botnet, which is a collection of compromised computers by a bot. Sometimes these compromised computers are geared up for a denial-of-service attack. Other times they are geared up to send more spam, and more malware in order to infect more computers.

2. Forum spam.

-No matter what, this type of spam is very typical as well. There are preventative measures available to stop forum spam.

3. Instant Messaging spam.

-Getting spam via Instant Messenger, is usual, and just to warn you, do not click on links referring to websites you do not trust.
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You will find that increases in spam happen when a huge event occurs. For example, Valentine's day, Haiti earthquake, or Hurricane Katrina, etc. Or a big news story can also increase more spam, like the Michael Jackson death, etc.

An estimated 50% of worldwide spam gets generated by Brazil and the United States. These are followed by India and South Korea at an estimation of 38%.

No matter what, the danger of spam is still on the rise.

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DragonMaster Jay