Spammers are trying to trick you
There are all sorts of people and organizations who contribute to the spam
problem, and their motivations vary. At Boston College we have seen many
types of spam, and sadly a number of people at BC have been victims of spam
scams. A few of the key motivations of spammers are to:
- Make Money. To sell you something – a cheap stock
or a cheap computer – and
in some cases they never actually deliver the product.
- Steal Personal Information. To trick you into sharing
your username, password, social security number or bank account number. They
use emails that look like
they are from Bank of America, eBay, PayPal etc, but are phony.
More
info on Scams
- Spread Viruses. To trick you into clicking on a link
that unknowingly downloads a virus to your computer and steals any email
addresses on your hard drive
so those can then receive spam too.
How did they get my email address?
Spammers gather email addresses through various sources:
- They use technologies that “crawl” the Web and gather up anything
on any web page that looks like it might be an email address.
- They guess at common addresses like, mary@domain.com, mike@domain.com.
- Sometimes
spammers get their addresses through vendors. You may purchase something
online from Store X, during the checkout process you may enter
your email address and agree to the terms of Store X’s privacy policy,
not realizing that the fine print says they will share your email address
with
other parties.
Note: If you get spam that is not addressed to you, your
email address is probably in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field.
Why can’t the spammers be caught?
Two examples of why spammers can’t be caught more easily is due to
the use of these two techniques:
- Botnets
Robot networks, or botnets, are innocent computers that have been compromised
by a virus and are used by spammers to send spam (or viruses). Rather
than sending spam directly from a server to a set of organizations, spammers
use these innocent computers as “botnets” to send spam indirectly—oftentimes
the computer user doesn't even know their computer is sending
spam. Estimates are that more than 60% of all spam attacks around the
world
are now sent using
botnets. Thankfully at BC, users are required to enter a password before
sending email; this ensures that computers on the BC network are not
the ones sending
spam.
- Spoofing
Spammers forge email addresses to hide the origin of their message. Spoofed
messages are intended to make the recipient believe that the message
has come from a legitimate source. Spoofing can be used for malicious
purposes to try
to obtain personal or business data.
Email Traffic and Spam home
