Security Bullet In
Communiques from the security front, sir
Wednesday 27 August 2008, 4:47 PM
Does it matter if you are an aardvark or a zebra?
"It makes quite a big difference," Clayton told me. "If you look at real zebras, they get less spam than real aardvarks."
For those of you surprised that real aardvarks and zebras have email accounts at all, perhaps it would be good to say that Clayton was speaking figuratively.
If 'aardvark' represents an email address beginning with 'a', and 'zebra' represents an email address beginning with "z", and if we are talking about 'real' email addresses that receive non-spam email, the aardvarks will get 35 percent spam, whereas the zebras will get 20 percent, said Clayton.
Clayton explained further in a blog post on Monday. There is a prevalence of dictionary-style spam attacks, where spam is automatically sent to a list of viable names. It follows that if you have an unusual name, you'll get less spam.
"The bottom line is that you should have an obscure name," Clayton told me.
PreviousComments on this post
Do you think it would create even less spam if numbers or characters were used at the begining of an address?
How about an application that would rotate a cycle of characters and numbers at the beging of an address, and only those who had the same app could send you an e mail.
It is still spam avoidance by obscurity but it is a good idea. The issue might be how to deal with hosting the email service. A lot of ISPs won't allow you to operate an email server without buying a commercial account or a web site or they filter the traffic based on IP port number.
The issue with changing the email address by flipping characters around is that to successfully deliver the email to the intended address, there has to be an MX record or some sort of address database entry for the address stored on the email server or on a DNS server. That could generate a lot of unwanted IP traffic and make the spam traffic load worse if a lot of people operated that sort of program because the spammers would attempt to counter that.
Good to see you back, how was the storm?
The thing that dissapionts me most, is that (according to internet security firm Marshal) people are responding to spam to buy their wares!!. So as long as people are going to send these bandwith hoggers money, then we are all pretty much stuffed!!
Maybe one or two high profile arrests are in order, but then we will have the same problems that we have now with drug dealers. There's always someone there waiting to jump into the big fishs shoes.
Spammers should be imprisoned and prevented from ever owning a company or a financial organization. They should have their Internet access shut off in perpetuity OR they should be forced to read aloud every piece of spam mail sent to their account and then respond to it!
Unfortunately there is no real way to regulate stupidity. And I don't want to get into licensing Internet users! Maybe as a condition of purchasing an Internet access account, ISPs could be forced to administer an interactive SPAM educational program to their new users that would force users to understand what SPAM is and what it looks like. But even that wouldn't make much of a dent in the stupidity factor.
I remember when back in the day, you could put all your junk mail into one of the return envolopes, and get great satisfaction from the fact you could return everything to source.
