Medication is what you need (would trillions of spams lie?)

There are slim pickings on the spam front in my email these days. The company's email filter mostly does its job and stops this bane of the internet from intruding too much. But no filter is perfect and six or seven a day bust through to annoy and waste time as they're trashed.

Anti-virus and spam filter maker McAfee has done some calculations on just how wasteful spam can be, estimating the annual sending, receiving and hand-deleting of 62 trillion email spams consumes a lot of energy every year - 33 terawatt hours to be precise.

It's a bit of a silly calculation because a large proportion of spam these days never sees the light of day and is automatically crunched by filters. Much is afoot in the war against spam and last year the good guys had something of breakthrough when they shut down a major hosting facility. It is said that spam levels dropped about 60 per cent after the bust. That meant instead of something like 153 billion spam messages being sent per day, the rate slowed to about 61 billion messages per day. Hooray.

But you can't keep a spammer down for long and there is a malevolent new trend. About 85 per cent of all email is spam and around 80 per cent also contains links to malware and malicious websites. Hackers exploit holes in Internet Explorer, Outlook Web Access, and use compromised Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo accounts to disguise spam to look like personalised email, fooling filters into believing the email came from a legitimate source. That's where it begins to get evil - emails that link back to malware or phishing sites (the ones that want your bank account details), or link to legitimate content that then leads to bad things. A recent Websense report showed 81 per cent of email was forged to send malicious code and 95 per cent of comments posted to blog or chat forums were spam or links to nasty payloads. In its Annual Security Report, Cisco predicts that worldwide spam volumes will increase by 30 or 40 per cent over 2009 levels. By far the biggest problem is the botnets - software robots, or bots, that run autonomously and automatically.

Botnet operators have control of millions of internet protocol addresses worldwide. That means millions of compromised home computers - zombies - unbeknown to their owners, are quietly running software in the background pumping out spam. Researchers are finding ways to decipher the templates botnets use to create spam, and users can do their bit by making sure they have anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall software installed. But the botnets always seem one step ahead.

Like most internet users, I hate this electronic pestilence, but once a year I put aside my prejudice and gather and read 100 consecutive spams. Painful I know, but my theory is that by examining the electronic detritus of society we may learn something about the human condition. Inevitably, it produces a sorry picture. This year, the prevailing zeitgeist of the sewers of cyberspace is prescription medication - a whopping 52 per cent of my spam. Everything from pain relief to weight loss to swine flu to sexual dysfunction can be solved with a pill. The clear winners in this category were Vicodin and Viagra, each amounting to 12 per cent of the spam. The surprise new entrant this year was scholarships and job offers (24 per cent) from a site called cambodiajobs.blogspot.com. Then came unreadable or foreign language spam (10 per cent) largely Chinese and Russian, followed by a smattering of the stalwarts of spam - software, relationships, Nigerian scams and lottery winnings.

Notable absentees were last year's winner, the mysterious string-of-meaningless-punctuation-marks spam and the previous year's tsunami of penis enhancement spam.

The last time online pharmaceuticals topped my spam influx survey was in 2004, indicating the phenomenon may follow a cyclic trend. It's also worth noting medication has consistently featured in the top categories of this survey, now in its 10th year. Which has got me wondering whether a self perpetuating mechanism may be at work. One of the online pharmaceutical spams I received was headed: "Feel at peace in the middle of war with". If that's medication to deal with the pain of spam conflict, I think I want some.

chris.barton@nzherald.co.nz