Spam. The incessant stream of irritating emails that pour into
your inbox offering you everything from loans you don't need to adult services.
The quantity of spam seems to be increasing exponentialy; in the last few
months we've seen it go from 60% of emails to 90%, representing a tripling of
the number of spam emails. A couple years ago spam was estimated to make up
approximately one in four emails, today it's more like nine in every ten and
there is no sign of it reducing.
Spam types
Broadly speaking there are four main types of spam.
Virus carrying
emails
These are messages sent from virus infected
machines to try to infect other machines. These machines sit there (often
without the user realising) with the virus scanning their inbox and sending out
copies of itself to all the email addresses it can find. The emails are
cunningly worded to try to look like normal emails and hope to get the
recipient to open a file or go to a web address where the virus is ready to
infect their machine. The virus itself may do many things from looking for bank
account details on the infected machine and sending them to a collector to
hi-jacking the machine, encrypting all your valuable documents and holding them
for ransom. Most of these virus carrying emails are caught and filtered out by
anti-virus software but the writers of these viruses are constantly exploiting
loopholes in security and virus protection.
Money making
scams
This type of spam has more of a purpose,
these are the ones which try to sell you something, a bargin usually, although
you are extremely unlikely to get anything worth the amount you pay if you take
up their offer. In fact you are more likely to get nothing at all except more
spam of the same type. The aim of these emails is obvious, they want your
money. Either offering you shares in duff companies that are going to go down
the pan in a couple of weeks or other similarly riskly get-rich-quick schemes.
Or they are trying to sell you products that they don't have, medical
products, fake watches, time-shares in Spain, that sort of thing.
Phishing mails
These are emails pretending to be from your
bank or some other financial institution asking you to 'check your details' or
reenter your passwords or pin numbers into a fake website that looks like your
banks website. Once you enter these details you get an error message but they
have now got your personal access codes or PIN numbers which they can then use
to pay for good or draw money from your account.
Nuisance mail
The last type of spam is just garbage. Drivel
churned out automatically by programs whose only purpose seems to be to annoy
us.
Stopping the Spam
So how can you stop all this junk mail filling up your inbox? There are several
ways, some more effective than others. We recomend a service called
Softscan.
The way it works is that all your incomming email is sent to Softscan's servers
where all the spam and virus infected emails are filtered out and the good
stuff is then sent on to you. For our clients that have signed up for this
service it has resulted in about 97% reduction in spam. And with spam on the
increase all the time, the time saved by not having to clean out all the
rubbish from your inbox every morning more than pays for the service. The
service is secure, reliable and it works, we use it ourselves and recomend it
to our clients. It was recently voted Best Anti-spam and Best Content Filtering
solution by the UK’s leading security magazine and recently awarded the highest
certification of Premium Checkmark Anti-Spam. Further details can be found on
Softscan's website.
Softscan has several advantages over other methods.
Spam never
even gets to your mail server or inbox.
Because all your email goes through the Softscan filtering before it is sent to
you, you only recieve the good mail, you don't even see the spam. This results
in much less load on your systems and also means that junk mail doesn't hog
your ADSL bandwidth. Spam can also be used maliciously in 'denial-of-service'
attacks where your email server is constantly bombarded with thousands of
emails bringing it to a standstill. Softscan protects you from this by standing
in the way of this onslaught.
More spam
is recognised and stopped.
Because Softscan is scanning emails for
lots of companies it gets to see a wider variety of spam types and can
therefore recognise and filter out a wide variety of messages. If you used a
localised filtering process it would have to be kept up to date on the latest
styles of spam.
Known
sources of spam are blocked completely.
Softscan now employs IP blocking to block
all mail comming from known spam sources. Lists of IP addresses are held for
known spam sources and any emails originating from these IP addresses are
automatcally blocked. The effect of this is huge, around 50% to 60% of spam
comes from these sources.
Zero
maintence solution.
Softscan constantly updates all its
filters and lists as new viruses and spam sources and types are noticed. You
don't need to do anything, the system is constantly giving you the best
filtering available. Softscan
Other Preventative Measures to Take
In addition to signing up to Softscan you would be wise to take other measures
to further guard against spam.
Some spam is sent directly to IP addresses rather than using DNS so you should
block all incomming SMTP mail except from the Softscan servers. That way all
your mail has to come through the filtering process. This can often be done by
setting a rule on your ADSL router or firewall.
Also if you are using a mail server you should set a similar rule to block all
outgoing SMTP except from your server. The reason for this is that many viruses
send emails direct from the infected machine rather than through the mail
server. If you have an infected machine churning out spam, apart from
contributing to the level of spam generally it may also result in your IP
address being blacklisted as a spam source. This could cause you to have
trouble getting recipients to accept genuine emails from you if they are using
filtering based on these blacklists. So by blocking such activity you are not
only helping to reduce spam propagation but you could also be saving yourself
from headaches later on.
