By Jim Tiller, Vice President, Security Professional Services, North America, BT Global Services
SPAM, a constant fixture in the Internet, reached a feverish pitch around the turn of the century and represented the lion’s share of e-mail traffic around the world. This situation continued for several years – until recently. Based on a number of reports, at a time of year when SPAM is usually at its annual zenith, there has been a significant decline in SPAM volume. While this has baffled some and many see it as an anomaly, it can also be seen as an indicator of a change in the threat spectrum.
E-mail is a universal method of Internet communication, but with the proliferation of Twitter, Facebook, unified communications, mobility, and the complex array of collaboration apps and services that exist, e-mail has become, well, old school. Moreover, the simple fact remains that a large percentage of the most common forms of SPAM are filtered out by layers of well-established, proven technologies. In short, from a SPAMer’s perspective, they’re getting less bang for the buck. Therefore, it should be no surprise that as the use of the Internet shifts for businesses and individuals, so will the threat. And SPAMers, too, will look to leverage new communication methods to fill your inbox, Facebook wall or Twitter account.
Of course, there is a more sinister element at play – specifically, highly targeted SPAM – or phishing, spear phishing, etc. This is unwanted communications that look and “feel” real, but are just noise at best, contain malware at worst, or most dreadfully, fool people into exposing private information. The drop in detected SPAM may be simply that these more, well-formed communications in e-mail, Twitter, and others are simply getting past the net undetected.
Now that established organizations are using these technologies and apps to interact with their clientele in new ways, people expect to see a tweet, SMS or wall post from a company they have a relationship with – and the threats know this. When one extrapolates and projects out the potential of this reality, it is well within reason to see an increased level of fraud, identity theft, and malware proliferation because this is Greenfield opportunity for threats.
Although all this is completely speculation, it’s reasonable to assume that SPAM is migrating to other evolving forms of Internet-based collaboration technologies and by doing so, broadening their spectrum of opportunity to manipulate systems and people, and potentially more effectively. Although anti-SPAM technologies exist, many are still directed at traditional e-mail and not necessarily social networking interactions that are accessible from virtually any platform, any time, from anywhere.
Just because we saw less SPAM when we should have seen a spike doesn’t necessarily mean the SPAMers took a holiday. In fact, the decline in SPAM should be seen as evidence of a new focus – one more targeted, impactful, and one taking a path of least resistance.
Given the entanglement of technology, mobility and anything-all-the-time-app-for-that-culture, e-mail is yesterday’s technology – the threats know this and are moving to capture this new market – you.
