Garrett Saundry
Spam! We all know it, and we all hate it. Some start out offering miracle cures for baldness, weight loss or magic pills for any other ailment you can think of. Others are from famous lawyers in another country, who would like to introduce you to one of their clients, most of the time disgraced African royalty who are in desperate need of your assistance to smuggle their millions of dollars secretly out of the country so that they may start a better life elsewhere.
Spamming, technically defined is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages. The term spam was said to originate from an old Monte Python skit where the word was repeated at least 132 times over the course of the three and a half minute sketch.
The Origin of Spam
Back in the 1970’s the Internet, which wasn’t even called the Internet at that point but referred to as ARPANET was just in it’s infancy, used primarily by universities and the defense department as a tool for communicating between far flung satellite campuses. Back in the day, ARPANET was highly regulated and you needed to go through all sorts of applications to be given a login ID for it; not as simple as it is today where you can just call your local ISP, give them some money and be happily cruising your favourite sites a few minutes after the installation has been completed.
The first Spam email was sent May 1st 1978 to every ARPANET user on the West Coast. Our nefarious spammer got all the email addresses from a printed directory that contained the information of all the people on ARPANET. It was sent by Gary Thuerk , advertising one of his company’s new systems. At the time, the mail program could only take 320 email addresses, the rest of the addresses overflowed into the body of the text. The Defense Communications Agency, which ran ARPANET, called Thuerk’s boss to complain, along with many others. If only getting the Spam to stop these days was that easy.
The Spamhaus Project , Fighting the Good Fight!
Fast forward a few (20) years into the future, and we see the birth of the Spamhaus Project (www.spamhaus.org). Simply put, this project is a volunteer effort founded by Steve Linford in 1998 that aims to track email spammers and spam-related activities.
Spamhaus is responsible for three well used DNS Blocklists, the Spamhaus Block List (used to identify IP addresses of known spammers), the Exploits Block List (a list of known open proxies and exploited computers being used to send spam and viruses), and the Policy Block List (lists dynamic and DHCP type IP address space designated as ‘not allowed to make direct SMTP connections’, as well as static assignments that shouldn’t be sending email without prior arrangement).
Spamhaus has a Register of Known Spam Operations, which is a database of “hard-core spam gangs” — spammers and spam operations who have been terminated from three or more ISPs due to spamming. This register is a directory of publicly-sourced information about the most hard core spammers along with their operations.
I would highly recommend you visit Spamhaus.org if you’re looking for more information about spam, blacklists, who’s sending it (IP addresses) and new scams used to harvest email addresses.