spam & worse!

It is with a slightly heavy heart that we look forward to some of the less savoury changes we will see technologically over the forthcoming year and how they may affect you. Although there is a record amount of SPAM being produced, its impacts on your inbox, department and business are becoming less; Not because there is less being sent but because your IT department are getting better at filtering them out and intercepting them before they get to you. However due to the empowering nature of the internet and the effect it is having on our whole communications strategies, 2007 has introduced a set of new issues into the business place, some or all of which may become commonplace irritations in our lives.

With automated computer systems endlessly trawling the electronic ether that surrounds and interacts with all of us, your privacy, your time and your businesses will all be encroached upon in innovative new ways and the following article will hopefully pre-arm you to best deal with these predicted annoyances.

1. SPASMS – Spam over SMS
Everyone that has ever owned a mobile will have encountered SPASMS, Spam over SMS, attempting to coerce you into the latest unnecessary upgrade or to make you ditch your brand new contract with the lure and promise of better deals, handsets and contracts. As the software on your mobile phone becomes ever more complex and its integration with its SMS services become ever tighter security holes will no doubt begin to appear in exactly the same way as the PC virus threat has escalated. 2006 saw the first instances of individuals being able to watch all of their PVR (Personal Video Recorder, such as Sky+ or TiVo) media, streamed from their house to their mobile phone and 2007 will invariably reveal more fantastic technologies to link you with all of your devices through your phone. However imagine if you will the headache in securing every single one of your devices against hackers, when this was previously no issue at all, because they are suddenly not just connected to each other, but via the internet, to every other device in the world!

The real mobile threat is from the next generation of viruses which will then compromise a phone into secretly sending messages, raiding your phone book for numbers and searching all of your stored media (films and music) to paint a perfect picture of you as a consumer. Most people can deal with being sent the odd annoying text message but once these start coming with viruses attached we will see problems.

The verdict: SPASMS is not the big issue facing mobile phones but their security as the complexity of their software increase. Don't advertise your number and for now you should be spared most nuisance texts. Irritation factor: 3/10

2. SPIM – Spam over Instant Messaging
Fortunately for the business world, instant messaging is still considerably less important than either email or Internet Telephony and is principally the province of the home user. Many school kids rely on instant messaging to stay in touch with their friends, out of school hours and is considered relatively 'safe' by parents who appreciate its cheapness and the facts that it keeps the kids out of the way (and quiet!). However, the first few instances of targeted SPIM have started occurring, offering typical SPAM products to the youth using these services.

The business case for SPIM seems a little odd until you start considering that the age group from 11-14 is notoriously difficult to market to and that targeting instant messaging clients such as Yahoo! Messenger and MS Instant Messenger gets an aggressive marketers sights set firmly on this captive and vulnerable group. Unfortunately its not just kids that use Instant Messaging and some businesses rely on IM to conduct brief meetings across vast distances, as well as sharing files and undertaking some basic collaborative working practices. So how do you minimise the intrusion and irritation that the delivery of ads during your meetings could provide? The first step is to make sure that you always have the latest patches for your messaging client and that your security definitions are all up to date. After that you are slightly stuck as IM clients are notoriously difficult to block using a conventional firewall and virus writers have also begun to target IM clients as a way to execute hostile code on your computer.

The verdict: Don't use IM unless you have to, but if you do and are up to date, not much should go wrong.
Irritation Factor: 4/10

3. SPIT – Spam over IP Telephony Spam over IP telephony is the next big irritation. Over the past year many companies have been shifting to incorporate IP telephony into their business and some are now completely reliant on the technology for their core vision. Due to the money-saving nature of making phone calls over the internet we will only see the uptake of this technology increase, along with the home products such as Skype and Vonage taking a more advanced place in our home lives. Obviously as the adoption of this tech. becomes more widespread, the viability of Spam style attacks towards the devices increases in direct proportion. SPAM style attacks on IP telephones are actually quite simple in theory – A hacker writes a simple program to scan IP addresses (the unique number that identifies your computer on the internet) and look for an IP telephony response. Leave this program trawling for a couple of weeks and you have a massive repository of phone numbers, known to be active, to plug into a cheap mass dialling system attached to a hard sale, overseas call centre.

The problem for the end user of the telephony service is that the criminals running the call centre have now massively reduced their costs in running their illegal business as the main fixed costs to them (the cost of the calls and sourcing the phone lists) have now all but disappeared. To fight this problem a similar standpoint will have to be taken to that with Spam. Certain IP blocks will be blacklisted, effectively meaning that no-one from these 'areas' of the internet will be able to phone you at all, meaning that the otherwise endless streams of nuisance calls begins to dry up. At this point the spammers will no doubt resort to slapping malware onto insecure computer with IP telephones installed in order to circumvent this method of prevention. As always then, it is incredibly important to be completely up to date with your patches and updates and make sure that you have the most stable form of your software installed (this usually doesn't NOT mean the latest version, until it has had a couple of revisions and patches).

The verdict: IP telephony is essential. Expect a set of tools similar to spam filters to appear over the next year to help alleviate the threat. Make sure that your system is continually patched and all your virus and malware programs are the latest versions.
Irritation Factor: 8/10