BW Online | April 22, 2003 | Anti-Spammers Get Serious

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APRIL 22, 2003

SECURITY NET
By Alex Salkever

Anti-Spammers Get Serious
AOL's latest lawsuits join new efforts in Washington and technological attempts to stop the scourge, which is growing costlier every month

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America Online is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore. On Apr. 15, the country's biggest Internet service provider (ISP) announced a round of five lawsuits against notorious spammers. The suits seek at least $10 million in civil damages and court orders to halt the junk-mail barrage. AOL (AOL ) has also sent out over 100 cease-and-desist letters to alleged spammers. On the technology side, it has upgraded its spam-blocking systems to try to prevent much of the unwanted e-mail from hitting customer inboxes and gumming up AOL's servers. "Spammers take note: You can run, but you can't hide," says Randall Boe, AOL's general counsel.

This is the second round of lawsuits that AOL has filed against spammers in the past two years. And it's just one of a handful of anti-spam efforts coalescing this spring. On Apr. 11, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) reintroduced the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography & Marketing) Act. The bill mandates stiff financial penalties and heavy jail time for anyone who spams using invalid or fake e-mail addresses.

Even the staid professional body that sets technology standards for the Internet is getting involved. In March, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) started an anti-spam working group. This brain trust of spam-fighting notables will recommend ways that ISPs and other operators of key Internet infrastructure can reduce junk traffic. At the same time an increasing number of ISPs and big companies are adopting anti-spam technologies to help their employees evade the never-ending barrage.

BILLIONS SERVED. Behind the multipronged attack is the growing realization that spam is now not just a nuisance but also a major unwanted cost. What's more, spam may well be on the brink of making e-mail nearly unusable.

According to CEO Enrique Salem of BrightMail, one of the largest anti-spam service providers, his company processed 55 billion messages in March, 2003. Salem says in 2001 when BrightMail launched, about 8% of the messages it processed were spam. In January, 2001, that tally hit 41%, meaning 4 out of every 10 messages traveling over the Internet early this year were probably Spam.

But wait. Salem says by March, the percentage had hit 45%. Using that math, with spam increasing at 2% per month, by yearend 63% of all messages on the Net will be spam.

EXTRA EXPENSES. That's probably a very low estimate, as Salem and others attest that spam growth is accelerating noticeably each month. For the most popular targets -- big ISPs such as AOL, Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Hotmail -- well over half of all the messages they process are already spam.

Add this up, and it's clear that soon spam will represent more than 90% of all traffic on the Net. Plus, the mere cost of processing it will dwarf the cost of moving valid e-mail. These costs will come in extra equipment required to handle the onslaught, extra employee hours to manage it, and extra efforts by lawyers to sue known spammers. According to messaging consultancy Ferris Research, spam will cost U.S. corporations $10 billion in 2003.

Witness the situation at Broadway Net, a small Manhattan ISP with 3,000 customers. It spent $3,000 last month to purchase a new mail server largely due to traffic increases fueled by spam overload. Mail administrators at Broadway Net estimate that they spend two hour per week dealing with spam on average and far more when bad things happen, such as the weekend a spam outfit hosed Broadway's servers with 77 megabytes of traffic (the usual level over a weekend is 4 megabytes). Most of the mail had a bogus address in front of the valid Broadway Net suffix, @bway.net. Mail addressed to nonexistent e-mail accounts within the Broadway Net domain wind up in the postmaster's inbox. As a result, the mail administrator spent many hours sifting through reams of unwanted spam and pulling out valid e-mails.

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