Spam reaches 30-year anniversary
Computer keyboard, Eyewire
Spam now makes up more than 80% of mail message traffic
Spam - the scourge of every e-mail inbox - celebrates its 30th
anniversary this weekend.
The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May,
1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC - a now-defunct computer-maker.
The message was sent via Arpanet - the internet's forerunner - and won
its sender much criticism from recipients.
Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that
sends out billions of messages every day.
Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare
people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more
than $239m (=A3121m).
Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or
junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.
The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home
computers that have been compromised by a computer virus.
Quick complaint
The sender of the first junk e-mail message was Gary Thuerk and it was
sent to advertise new additions to DEC's family of System-20
minicomputers.
It invited the recipients, all of whom were on Arpanet and lived on
the west coast of the US, to go to one of two presentations showing
off the capabilities of the System-20.
Reaction to the message was swift, with complaints re****tedly coming
from the US Defense Communications Agency, which oversaw Arpanet, and
took Mr Thuerk's boss to task about it.
Despite Mr Thuerk's pioneering spam it took many years for unsolicited
commercial e-mail to become a nuisance.
It took until 1993 before it won the name of spam - a name bestowed on
it by Joel Furr - an administrator on the Usenet chat system.
Mr Furr reputedly got his inspiration for the name from a Monty Python
sketch set in a restaurant whose menu heavily featured the processed
meat.
The sketch ended with everyone in the restaurant, encouraged by a
troupe of chanting Vikings, shouting: "Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam."
Junk mail, BBC
April 1994 saw another pioneering moment in the history of spam when
immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel sent a commercial spam message
to more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups.
The Canter and Siegel e-mail is widely seen as the moment when the
commercialisation of the net began and opened the floodgates that led
to the deluge of spam seen today.
Since those days spam has grown to be a nuisance and is now used by
many hi-tech crime gangs as the vehicle for a variety of scams and
cons.
"Spam is a burden on all of us," said Graham Cluley, senior technology
consultant at Sophos. "What's worse is that a lot of spam is
deliberately malicious today, aiming to steal your bank account
information or install malware."
|
