SPAM
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited and repetitive messages. The most common version of spam comes in the form of email sent via mass mailing and it is important that a business is protected from such threats.
Spam also comes in the form of telephony, SMS messages, and instant messaging.
How does SPAM occur?
A common first step for spammers is to gain as many email addresses as possible from an organization. One way to achieve this is to use bots (application programmed to do automatic tasks) to “crawl” the internet to find email addresses in web pages. Spammers can also use the dark web (anonymous part of web that can only be accessed via special software) to buy a compromised database of a company.
Over time, more sophisticated methods of gaining email lists have emerged. Such as editing the code within the messages sent to the mail servers of an organization to bypass spam filters. The purposes of spam can range from the advertisement of a product for profit to more destructive effects such as gaining remote access to employee
Regardless of the intention of the spam, it is important for a business to use defensive measures to prevent spam from entering its network in the first place.
Data collection
Paid Services
Zombie Machines
Enticing Messages
How is spam harmful to businesses?
On a network, spam normally causes a decrease in the network's resources such as bandwidth by taking up precious disk space. For individual employees, spam can cause the spread of malicious content via an attached or embedded file, link or picture. Once malware infects a single user’s computer, it is able to spread throughout the internal network of a business and affect various devices such as printers, firewalls, and database servers.
Because of the numerous adverse effects of spam, organizations must have measures in place to stop it as soon as possible as well as adapt to the various ways spam tries to reach an organization’s internal network.
Spam Statistics
Over
50%
of all global email in 2017 was spamam.
- The most common type of malicious attachment in spam emails are trojans (malware disguised as software)
- Current events such as political elections and natural disasters are popular methods used by attackers to entice the intended victims to interact with malicious and infected spam.
- 2017, the most popular way to disguise malicious emails was to dress the spam as if came from Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo.