Safe Internet Alliance

Late last month, Alan Ralsky, considered by many to be the "Godfather of spam," was sentenced to 51 months in prison for committing wire and mail fraud. He and three others involved in his operation engaged in manipulative stock trading by sending spam e-mails with misleading information that promoted stocks for U.S. companies owned by people in Asia.

Though one of spam's oldest practitioners will now be behind bars, the sheer volume of spam will live on without him. Though the US used to be the leading producer of spam, that honor now goes to Brazil. A recent study released by Symantec’s MessageLabs found that 87.7 percent of the total email traffic is spam, a significant increase from last year. Much of this spam came from botnets, which are malicious programs that take over PCs unbeknownst to their users..

Of course, most people who employ the use of spam filters in email platforms like Gmail don't see the overwhelming majority of these messages, but those who orchestrate the spamming are continually devising ways to bypass these filters.

"Cybercriminals are learning from their mistakes and investing massively, both in terms of human and financial resources," ITProportal concluded from the report. "2010 looks set to become yet another challenging year for the security industry worldwide as the rise of mobile computing makes it even easier to face security risks."

One way that spam is evolving is through its appearance in the "real time" web. Google just recently announced the launch of real time search, and with that we already see signs of spammers taking advantage of it.

The first concern Hoffman noticed is a spam issue. Upon tweeting about Viagra, she found that her results were showing up in Google’s results. She was even able to drop links into her tweets that people could access directly from Google.

Secondly, Hoffman uncovered reputation management issues with Google’s new integration. An unhappy employee or competitor could easily damage a company’s reputation. During a session at SES Chicago, Dave Naylor even mentioned that he might have to clean up his Twitter stream over fear of losing business.

Thirdly and probably the most serious of the issues Hoffman revealed is the safety concerns for children online. Through a series of tests including the highest level of safe search, Hoffman was able to reach out to kids who searched for queries such as Sesame Street and Miley Cyrus. Unfortunately, sexual predators could easily do the same.

One way of approaching the spam problem is by applying Hosted Antispam. It's sold on a subscription model and often companies can save money and bandwidth by employing it.

"Outsourcing this function frees both the bandwidth required to receive these messages and the server processes necessary to examine them," wrote B. K. Winstead in the April Windows IT Pro Magazine. "And when you consider that most estimates suggest that 95 percent or more of all messages are spam, you can see that these resource savings could be huge for your organization."

Spam is reaching a level of sophistication that perhaps even Alan Ralsky, the Godfather of spam, wouldn't recognize it when he gets out of prison. As Marjorie Blumenthal, Provost, Georgetown University, and David Clark, Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, argue in a paper, "“There is a tussle between spammers and those who would control them, between merchants who need to know who buyers are and buyers who use untraceable e-mail addresses, and between those who want to limit access to certain content and those who try to reach it. This pattern suggests that the balance of power among the players is not a winner-take-all outcome, but an evolving balance."

That balance fluctuates, as we saw when authorities shut down two major spam ISPs recently. But it wasn't long before spam had returned and surpassed its previous volume. Unfortunately, the spammers are here to stay,