The progression and effects of Spam.
Based on a comment I made on someone's question about Spam, I felt it might be a little more informative to everyone if I gave a little more detail on the subject.
According to Wikipedia and Google, Spam is defined as the following:
"Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages."
While that may seem vague, it is an accurate definition. What started out as annoying email messages, it has now progressed into areas such as IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels to actually modifying HTML pages in order to push them high up on search engine relevancy lists.
Spammers typically "shotgun" their messages out randomly, which is why ads on pornographic sites can show up where you work or on your child's computer.
Spam has become a security issue to the point of spreading viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and phishing attacks. It has also developed into blogspam, which is where all of those comment spams are coming from.
The direct result of all this is the wasted use of computer resources as well as the wasted time we have to give it in order to clean up all of this junk. The game that spammers are playing show up in the form of fake contact information to set up false accounts at other ISPs. They are constantly working to come up with new ways of overriding any filters that are put in place to block their messages.
Let me know if I can be of further assistence on this.
Dave
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Awesome information Dave, I really think that you have a passion and deep fervor for internet security. You have some very lucid explanations that are not ambiguous at all. I can see that you would be an amazing teacher in this subject. I do have a question though, how do, "distributed denial's of service" work? How is it that these sort of obstructions are generated? I'm asking because this question kind of came to my mind when I thought of a recent hack into Sony's network, how is it that you think hackers were able to actually get into that caliber of security? What's your take on this?
First of all, the Sony thing, that was a failure of their inside security group. They had some hidden vulnerability holes within their network they did not see or were not aware of that allowed the hackers to have access into the network. And this happened more than once.
As far as Ddos, it is all about resource overloads which is what the denial is all about. If I hack into your network at home, I can implement code as part of a program that constantly bombards your server with traffic, to the point that your servers and workstations just lock up due to them trying to address whatever routine the traffic is generating.
It could be anything from constant login attempts using invalid credentials to sending a constant stream of request packets over your network, demanding acknowledgement packets from your servers and workstations. As the server and / or workstations are so busy trying to keep up with the demand, the next thing you know, you are dead in the water due to a Ddos attack.
Let me know if this clears it up a bit for you.
Dave
Wow! Thought you had an amazing response, so how would you respond to a security breach in your network, what actions would you take to de-mask the anonymity of the individual or individuals behind the attack?
You need to trace the source of the traffic which at times can be a bit dicey since IP addresses can be spoofed. When I worked for a credit union, we were blamed for initiating a ddos attack against another company since it appeared to be coming from us due to the way hackers had engineered the attack. Sometimes hackers will hack into other companies networks to use those resources to attack another company. So when you looked at the traffic on your own network, it looks like you are being attacked from Macy's , Target, BestBuy, Sears, etc. when in actuality they had nothing to do with it.
Basically it would involve using specific software to look at all of the equipment out on the Internet in the path to your network.
Depending upon the skill-set of the hackers, it could take awhile to finally track them down. The local FBI office where you live is always ready to help companies out in this effort. They have some impressive tools that they have access to in order to assist them.
I once reported a terrorist website that I discovered to our local FBI cyber team and they took action immediately to figure out what was going on with it.
Dave
Really enjoy talking to you about internet security. Could you provide me with the link to your website. I would really be willing to subscribe to your mailing list if you have one, because the info that you give is really one of a kind. I am definitely eager to read your post now. I really feel like I could learn a lot through your website about internet security. Also, who knows? I might have some pretty helpful information to help better the overall appearance/structure of your site .
I am not at the point of having a mailing list set up yet, but my site is http://www.familysafedata.com
Dave
Awesome! Will definitely drop some major critique on your site. Hope it will definitely help you out :)