When you watch a revolution playing out on your television, the last thing you think about is spam. However, the Egyptian government’s attempt to stop its citizens from using the internet had a curious side-effect. It imposed an almost complete block on internet activity to stop people from planning demonstrations, in the way the people of Tunisia had done to bring down the regime there.
The Egyptians themselves have largely managed to find ways of circumventing the law. But people outside have noticed one major change. Spam levels coming from that country have plummeted. The latest figures from security vendor Sophos suggest that the amount of spam coming from Egypt from last week when the ban was introduced has dropped by 85 per cent.
It’s thought that one ISP, the Noor Group, has been allowed to continue because it hosts the Egyptian Stock Exchange. All of the major service providers were told cut their internet services at midnight on Friday. Curiously, the government in Cairo did nothing to stop the flow of street-level video showing angry, violent confrontations. They turned off the Internet instead.
It failed to stop the crowds but Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in a blog post that it had stemmed the flow of spam. “While I'm not advocating this as a method to stop the spam problem, it seems to confirm media reports of the extent to which internet access is currently available (or unavailable) to the Egyptian people.”
Spam – those unwanted emails promoting Viagra and other less savoury services – has been the bane of the Internet almost from the time it started. But 2011 could be the year in which the tide starts to turn. Global spam levels have been dropping fairly quickly in recent months. And several IT security companies believe it will continue.
Symantec's latest “Intelligence Report” shows that spam now accounts for 78.6% of all email traffic. That may sound a lot but it’s the lowest since March 2009 and down almost 66% from a year ago. And the networking firm Cisco’s figures in its Annual Security Report for 2010 claim that spam fell 90% between August and December.
However, the report points out that, while global spam is falling, developed countries like the UK, Germany and France actually saw a rise in the last year, mainly because these countries had been rapidly expanding their broadband connections. Great Britain, it says, saw such messages almost double between 2009 and 2010.
However, that’s not the experience of Scots-based ISP Lumison. Its chief executive, Aydin Kurt-Elli, said that “according to our systems team, we have seen spam down from a peak of 10m a day in early 2008 to about 1m a day over December and January 2010/11. Indeed, generally levels are dropping off, and we are certainly seeing customers generally becoming aware.
“With users being more savvy however, they are getting better at checking for false positives (legitimate messages wrongly marked as spam).” However, he accepts that some of the general decline in spam seen by his company has more to do with its business focus, concentrating more on specialist IT and Datacentre services and less on the consumer market.
Consumers still seem to be the main targets of spammers who, Cisco believes, are facing ever more dangerous threats. The cyber-criminals are using newer and more malicious software for “phishing”, abusing the user’s trust and deceiving them so that they reveal passwords and login details. In particular, these include e-mails apparently sent by a relative or friend.
The report also warned of another change of tactics. Until recently, the spammers went for Windows-based products, especially Outlook. But there’s been an increase in the use of what are known as “rogue applications” for smartphones, especially targeting Android and iPhone systems. Social networks have also been targeted but they’ve worked hard to reduce the risks on their sites.
According to Cisco’s vice-president, John N Stewart, the challenge was in preventing those miscreants' attacks each and every time in case safeguarding information and networks were considered important and added that miscreants could win once, but security professionals had to win every single time.
Within the past few hours, another company has officially joined the battle against spam, Google. It launched a new algorithm yesterday in an effort to combat spam in search results. The head of Google's Webspam team, Matt Cutts, confirmed in his blog that the filter was now live. The move comes as a result of complaints about 'noise' in search result soaring in recent months.
If the new system works, it will target sites known as “content farms”. These have little or no real content but dozens of links. Then there are hacked sites which Google says will be much easier to detect hacked sites. Finally, there are sites where content has simply been copied from elsewhere with only original content being given a high ranking by the search engine.
It will almost certainly mean that life will become even harder for those who claim to be able to produce effective Search Engine Optimisation. Google already changes its general algorithms several times a week. It means that their efforts will have be more focused than ever on producing original and regularly updated written content, with subtle keyword placement.
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