Spam emails can be the source of a potential threat or danger if not curtailed at the very start. Read below to know how to prevent them from flooding your mailbox.
Since the advent and advancement of technology, the transition from postal mail to email has been a heady makeover with a lot of people still unable to grasp the nitty-gritty of the concept altogether. The senior generation of folks who have grown up with postal mail or snail mail as it is referred to nowadays, for almost the larger part of their lives are still struggling to catch on to the intrinsics of email technology at the far end of their lives.
Earlier it was a matter of choice, but nowadays with postal mail almost reduced to redundancy, adapting to emails is almost imperative for everyone to stay in touch with their near and dear ones. Whereas emails are the pinnacle of technology, they are poles apart from the concept of snail mail and inundate the recipient’s inbox at the pace of lightning. A lot of people from the older generations, tend to take all emails arriving in their inbox very seriously. Some are even tempted to open and respond to emails with marvelously unbelievable subject lines which supposedly are messengers of unexpected good news or miracles.
Stories of people responding to emails that promise them a hefty sum of money from an unknown benefactor in another country or location and ending up losing money and peace of mind are quite increasingly common. It has often prompted the police and regulatory authorities to take things seriously, but no amount of action was able to retrieve the lost sum or trace the accused mischief-monger.
Welcome to the world of spam emails directed to your inbox from a mass mailing service in the hope that some will bite onto the bait.
Introduction:
Spam emails are a common occurrence but even as awareness is spreading among people, there is no lack of poor unsuspecting people who will fall victim to the lure of this fishy business. Spam Emails are a different world altogether and comprise of anything and everything that can be corroborated to trap unsuspecting victims into their devious designs. It can be:
- a fake story informing a recipient of winning a bumper lottery,
- it might be fake news informing the recipient of a false occurrence or
- it may simply be a fake message attempting to malign the image and name of a certain entity, individual, or brand.
As with every other aspect of life, there are good and bad associated with the gems of technology as well. Spam emails that are undetected by the junk filters in every mailbox manage to scrape into the recipient’s primary inbox and more often than not are loaded with fake and misleading news. This is currently the source of a lot of chaos and misinformation resulting in crime, violence, and even commotion.
Looking at the dilemma from a global perspective, studies reveal that almost 320 billion spam emails are sent every day and 94% of malware is delivered via spam emails. It is another troublesome element that is delivered by Spam emails.
Malware is encrypted software that attacks the recipient’s system or device and steals their information to pass it on subsequently to the miscreants for misuse and manipulation.
The latest analysis report from Cisco Talos intelligence projects the daily spam volume just for April 2021 at 320 billion. To put it plainly, Spam is an unwanted presence and is always undesirable, to some extent annoying, at times amusing, and even dangerous. Google has revealed that its Gmail service, filters out more than 100 million commonly recognizable phishing emails every single day, of which almost 18 million try to capitalize on COVID-19 in some way or the other. In terms of numbers, that amounts to as much as 94% of malware being delivered by email, 1 in every 3,000 email messages being the source of potential malware carriers[4] . It’s 2022 now and spam emails are still an active predicament with no sign of stopping anytime soon.
A brief history of spam
If one has to attempt to trace the history and origin of spam, the story is a long and dishonorable one. Spam or essentially irrelevant advertising emails started with the first emailer in 1994 to advertise a green card lottery service started by two lawyers, Canter & Seigel.
It was this simple craft of advertising that laid down the foundation of the junk email phenomenon and became a precedent for what we affectionately refer to today as Spam. The potential danger and threat that the method concealed was demonstrated very soon after when the ILOVEYOU worm was delivered by email to infect the Operating System of millions of Windows-based computers. In the following two decades, spam has retained its position as the primary vehicle for distributing and delivering malware along with holding the pole position for being an evergreen source of annoyance and irritation.
How do you deal with a problem like Spam?
So, after much debate and discussion, the inference is obvious, how do we handle spam? After spam was identified as an element possessing the potential to cause threat and damage, it initiated the process to create Spam filters. The prototype or iteration for an operational Spam filter was unpacked, twenty years ago in the form of a spam blacklist. These shortlisted names of designated spammers were the most popular spam filter or anti-spam technique.
Needless to say, owing to the simplicity of this arrangement, it did not take long for it to become obsolete and in turn outdated. It did not take long for hackers or spammers to realize that they were being singled out by blacklisting their location or IP address and switching to another IP address. It was not very difficult to infer as spammers used the same service provider as most of their targets, mainly due to the lack of any other options. Hence, overriding such protective barriers became very simple and the rule of spam became the order of the day soon enough.
The next upgrade or development on this front was dedicated spam filtering solutions employing the use of the recognized list of typical Spam keywords and sender reputation scoring. Additionally, this method also provided the impetus to the recipient to identify any spam mail that has managed to trickle into their mailbox and mark it as spam manually to add to future blacklists.
Fast-forward to the year 2022, email service providers are now accessible as applications and they come factory fitted with anti-spam mechanisms. With the advantage of advanced technology to its benefit, Email service providing giants Gmail, for example, employ the use of machine learning algorithms that power its Spam Filtering feature for its user base of more than 1.5 billion for achieving 99.9% accuracy in Spam filtering. That’s impressive, but when you consider the number of spam messages that still make their way to your primary inbox, .01% accounts for a mighty large number of active spammers.
How does Spam affect businesses, enterprises, and professionals?
While ordinary spam is potentially harmless apart from clogging up the space on your mailbox, it is phishing emails or encrypted messages that are embedded with malware that is the real source of threat for businesses, organizations, and professionals. While most businesses have secured networks and private connections to discourage the influx of spam or phishing emails, at times spammers do tend to get the better of us and expose glaring loopholes in the system.
The Effect of Spam on Businesses:
Like phishing emails, spam can also be designed to appear legitimate in the garb of encrypted disguise thereby enabling interaction. It is at this point that spam becomes a serious threat capable of disrupting an organization and kidnapping its operations. Reports suggest, 16 malicious spam emails make it to work email addresses every month. That’s 192 emails a year per employee. These stats when added up for all the employees in any company present figures that are damaging for any small or medium business enterprise.
Spam is a major unwanted expense for businesses around the world costing companies and multinationals billions of dollars in hampered productivity, security breaches, and other issues. Prior instances of compromised security through spam mails are glaring examples of Cerber, Petya, and Locky ransomware which have made their targets bankrupt overnight.
As per The Digital Guardian, “The authors of Cerber were especially opportunistic, offering their ransomware operations as a service in return for a 40% cut of the profits earned from paid ransoms. According to Check Point researchers, Cerber infected 150,000 victims in July 2016 alone, earning an estimated $195,000 – of which $78,000 went to the ransomware’s authors.”
These instances from the past emphasize the importance of security and vigilance for businesses and enterprises against spam.
How spam can disrupt your business?
- Malware
Encrypted emails in the garb of disguise are most likely carriers of malware and are common instances of how a single email has the potential to bring an entire company to a standstill. Riding on the success of past attacks, spammers are now becoming extremely devious and creative with their spamming designs. When hit by malware, organizations have to incur expenses for data recovery and legal fees for compromised private data.
- Phishing attacks
Phishing emails are a variety of encrypted spam. In this case, the garb of disguise used makes it appear relevant or familiar to the unsuspecting user, prompting them to click on it thereby commencing downloads for malware attached. Very soon the malware hijacks the entire system to steal information or disrupt operations completely.
- Waste of Time & Space
For companies or organizations working on dedicated servers, anticipating 192 spam or junk emails per employee annually could translate to truckloads of memory space being eaten up on mail servers by waste material. Freeing up space and updating spam filters to prevent the repeat occurrence of the same is again incurring expenses and time on unproductive issues.
How to defend against spam?
- Report suspicious emails
- Train and educate your employees
- Never send private or confidential information via email
- Create backups for convenience in recovery in case of a data crash or compromise.
- Utilize multi-factor authentication to enhance your email security
Browser-enabled Spam filter Extensions: Private Relay by Mozilla Firefox
In the current day and age, browser-enabled extensions are common practice for enabling work and convenience. Mozilla Firefox, a popular web browser has recently launched an extension going by the name of Private Relay which is a Spam detector. The extension, although exclusively for Firefox users, is currently in the testing phase. The fact that it is being projected as the next best thing that could put an end to unwanted emails using a single click is something to look forward to. It remains to be seen how Mozilla’s Spam Filter revolutionizes the way we deal with unwanted, annoying, and potentially dangerous emails.
- The Concept
Private Relay works on the concept of creating an alias on-demand by simply clicking on the “Private Relay” radio button next to the email fields. Once marked, all emails from the corresponding sender will be directed to the alias namesake instead of the actual one. However, the function can be customized to redirect or forward the emails from the alias inbox to the original one subsequently, for verification purposes. Mozilla describes the Private Relay Firefox add-on as a unique arrangement to generate anonymous email addresses that forward to your real address.
- Protection from Cyber Threats
What makes it interesting, simple, and yet insightful is that removing the alias from the list of recipients translates to a complete stop on receiving further spam emails. All spam emails will be terminated from the corresponding sender and prevented from reaching your primary mail address.
This also reinstates the fact that Private Relay prevents revealing the actual email contact details in case of a breach or a case of compromised security. Since multiple online accounts linked to the same user’s primary email contact are common practice, this exposes the user to a critical risk in case of a hacking or cyber threat. With Private Relay, that trouble is eliminated at the onset of things as well.
However, till the time the Browser Extension is made available for the common masses, we shall discuss the idea that fuels this practice. The idea revolves around creating email aliases or creating secondary email addresses that are not your primary point of email contact. So, using the secondary email address instead of the original one for signing onto websites and services does help to segregate, isolate, and identify the source of origin of Spam. But then again, it’s easier said than done and is labor-intensive as well.
The Future of Spam
Every dark cloud has a silverlining and every bit of good news might come at a cost. So, with the convenience of letters being delivered instantly, simply at the click of a button, there comes the drawback of unwanted mail that is designed to be potentially harmful. Till we are blessed with the benefit of technology to our rescue, spam is a regular occurrence we have to take into our stride moving forward.
Aware of the fact that the majority of the spam emails are filtered out to prevent them from reaching the primary mailbox, keep an eye for irrelevant mail that floods your inbox. Some of them are simply newsletters and communication emails that are blasted from automated mass mailing services. However, now and then neatly squeezed between piles of regular emails are masked emails that sound harmless but are armed with the ability to cause potential harm.
Instances of such emails are, people offering gifts and money over email in exchange for undue favors, emails requesting help in transferring money, emails with links embedded in the body of the content asking you to click on it in the garb of disguise or even emails asking you to download software or anything else.
We can be alert and responsive to the presence of such emails and direct them to the Spam filter to keep your email experience safe and enjoyable in the future. As technology is employed to benefit the larger section of humanity, there is also a section of the population that keeps devising ingenious plans to misuse technology to harm people. So, staying alert and aware can help you spot a spammer in the making simply by tracking emails that are irrelevant and demanding action from you in the garb of disguise.
To sum up
As Internet accessibility is made available to more people, spamming will get more devious to disrupt and distract people’s attention compelling them to take notice and act on their call to action. Earlier, they used to capitalize on people’s impulses by sending emails informing them of winning bumper prizes. Slowly the focus started shifting to making their emails sound more like from a real human and hence, entwining a story to exploit the emotional angle. As days pass, new methods will be devised to achieve the means to their end. So spamming is never-ending and while we wait for automated enablers to keep our mailboxes spam-free, it is advisable to stay alert and agile to identify spam and act on them or ignore them altogether while directing them to the Junk Mail folder.
So the next time you receive an email from a stranger, that perhaps sounds too good to be true, it just might be. Be careful and learn to differentiate spam emails from real ones. Fortunately, technology is getting better by the day, so hopefully one day spam will be a thing of the past.