One of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested in the US recently, charged with a host of offences. But will it make any difference to the piles of junk clogging up our Inboxes every day?
Robert Alan Soloway, the so-called 'Spam King', whose company Newport Internet Marketing allegedly spewed out millions of spam emails, has been charged with email fraud, identity theft and money laundering in the US.
The 27-year old American has pleaded not guilty to all charges, but prosecutors say he has been using an army of hijacked zombie computers forming a botnet to send out spam since 2003.
However, his arrest is unlikely to make any difference to spam levels.
"I don't think Soloway's arrest is going to decrease spam levels at all. He was sued by Microsoft in 2005 for sending spam through MSN and Hotmail services, but that didn’t stop him or even slow him down," said Dan Field, managing director of anti-spam service ClearMyMail.
If Soloway is convicted he faces having $773,000 (about £393,000) made by his firm seized by prosecutors, a fine of $250,000 (£127,000) and up to 65 years in prison.
"He is not going to get 65 years. He'll probably do a deal to help prosecute bigger spammers than himself," said Field.
And that's the point - there will always more spam to can.
"There are 200 individuals managing teams responsible for 80 per cent of the spam globally. Most are in America, some are in Russia and the Ukraine and one or two are in China," said Field.
"If Soloway is taken out of the picture, there will be someone to fill his shoes," he added.
- Spam trail
Spammers prove elusive to authorities because they are spread all over the world, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, Sophos, who paints a vivid picture of the difficulties law enforcement agencies face.
"Spam in UK Inboxes could come from compromised computers in Poland, controlled by hackers in the Philippines, paid by spammers in the US. It is a complicated trail to follow to successfully convict spammers."
Considering the actual number of spammers worldwide is relatively small, their impact is huge. Figures about the amount of spam in circulation vary, but they are consistently on the high side.
“It does vary depending on how visible your inbox is, but it is anywhere between 60-80 per cent of all email sent," he told Web User.
ClearMyMail's Field put the figure higher, saying the proportion of email which is spam you receive could be up to 95 per cent depending on your ISP.
"It can depend on the ISP - some, such as TalkTalk, are targeted more than others," he said.
Its origins can differ, but Field says that 50 per cent of all spam that comes into the UK, where it is illegal to send unsolicited mail to a consumer, is from the US.
Most of the time spammers are trying to sell something dodgy - or not as the case maybe.
"Lots of fraudulent emails make up spam where the sender is trying to sell things they haven’t got, such as rental apartments," said Field.
Greg Day, security expert at McAfee, points out that spam comes in several flavours.
"Looking at spam categories, 52 per cent are trying to sell people what we politely call 'health and medicine' products. Other products commonly advertised by spam include watches - undoubtedly fakes, adult services, IT-related goods and financial services," he said.
You may think that nobody would be interested in buying anything advertised through spam, but you’d be wrong.
"We did a survey of 542 people this year and one in 20 admitted they had bought goods sold via spam," said Sophos' Cluley.
Punters who easily part with their money are just one end of a murky spectrum. At the other end people's PCs are being compromised.
"If a spammer sends emails from a single source, those servers are blacklisted and mail from them can be blocked, so the spammers have to find a moving distributed source - other people's PCs with clean IP addresses," explained McAfee’s Day.
- Chain of cybercrime
In order to compromise those PCs, spam kings hire malware authors - most likely in countries with traditionally relaxed cybercrime laws. They write the code that turns PCs into spambots, or machines that can send spam automatically without the owner's knowledge.
"Once a system is compromised, it joins a botnet - a network that unites thousands of compromised systems. They act like zombies - blindly executing remote commands. That's a very powerful instrument in the hands of the spammer," said Mike Greene, vice president of product strategy at PC Tools.
PC owners have no idea their computers have been compromised as often the infection happens when they are lured to a website with a virus designed to exploit a software vulnerability.
With their spam-spewing networks in place, spammers then use a variety of methods to send the mail out to Inboxes and evade anti-spam filters.
"Deliberate misspellings of words such as viagra are quite easy to spot and the method of replacing characters with numbers is dying out as spam filters have got wise to those techniques," said Field.
- Sorting office
Of course it is vital that legitimate email gets to intended recipients and spam filters take great care to sort the wheat from the chaff.
"There are two ends of the scale - ham, which is good mail, and spam. The filters build up a positive or negative score through carrying out millions of tests on the message," explained Cluley.
However, filters will never be 100 per cent effective and the unpalatable truth is that spam doesn’t look like it will ever disappear from the menu.
"Spam won’t stop as long as people continue to buy from spam messages. It will not grow much percentage-wise, but with more people getting email, it will grow that way and it is difficult for the law to do anything about it as it is a global problem," said Field.
As convergence gathers pace, spammers will not just rely on email but will increasingly turn to other channels, such as text messaging.
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