In part 1 of this article, I used an acronym to try to describe in my view what spam was. I also provided some informative links regarding spam. In this part, I want to go into more detail on the effects of spam. Spam can effect everyone, not just business or corporate.
Here are some effects:
1. Spam Spikes: These defeat anti-spam systems that rely heavily on signatures like desktop anti-virus systems do. For smaller businesses, this can be similar to a distributed denial of service attack. Also can effect email servers.
2. Increased work: SPAM can also add to the work for those people or businesses that review what spam comes into their sites. Sometimes spam contains useful information that can get confused as spam. During such reviews, decisions are made to keep or delete selected entries. Some elect to have spam automatically blocked and deleted, thus never having it reviewed.
3. SpamZoids: This is an every day Internet User who’s PC has been infected with a Trojan that sets up an SMTP application that sends out spam. SpamZoid is a term that I came up with to describe this problem.
Here are some forms of a SpamZoid:
One form is that the user’s PC forwards spam sent by a spammer and another form is that the Trojan came preset with spam and a mailing list. Thus the PC sends out spam and the user has no idea what is going on. The user may eventually understand that the PC is becoming slower than normal. There is also a 3rd form of a SpamZoid. In this case, there is an opposite effect of sending spam out, the user’s PC automatically downloads junk files from another site on the Internet. Thus wasting disk space. I found out about this form slightly over 2 years ago when a friend of mine encountered this problem.
More to come in part 3 (of 3), or you can refer to the first post:
