Spam — not just in your inbox anymore

A couple of years ago, I attended a meeting with the staff of the IT department of one of Britain’s largest trade unions. We were discussing a plan for me to train union officials to make better use of e-mail. One of the issues I raised was training people to avoid getting spam. “No need for that,” I was told. “Spam is not a problem.”


Even then, I was amazed. Already two or three years ago, heavy Internet users were finding that a significant portion of their incoming e-mail messages were offering them pornography, get-rich-quick schemes, and the like.
Today, everyone realizes that unsolicited commercial email has reached epidemic proportions.
As I write these words, the United Nations has even decided to attempt to tackle the problem. Regulators from sixty countries are spending this week in Geneva, meeting under the auspices of the International Telecommunications Union, discussing what governments can do.
Unfortunately, the problem is no longer spam in one’s email inbox. It’s gotten much worse. Spam is now everywhere.
One of the first places to be hit were the extremely popular instant messaging (IM) programs such as ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and many others. (By the way, these programs — though not widely used in the trade union movement — have attracted hundreds of millions of users. For example, the latest incarnation of ICQ was downloaded 247 million times from just one website.) If you use an IM program, chances are you’ll start getting hit by unwanted messages, just as you would with email.
SMS — the short text messages sent via mobile phone — is now also a means for the distribution of millions of unwanted messages. According to a recent study by a London-based mobile data services company, 65% of the world’s mobile phone users receive up to five unsolicited text messages per week. And that number is growing.
In other words, the same people who are attacking our e-mail are attacking every other means of communication that reach us — our mobile phones, our instant messaging software, and so on.
But they are not stopping there. Spammers are writing “robots” — automated computer programmes — which trawl the net looking for places to put free notices about their various products and services. One of the first victims has been the network of weblogs (also known as blogs). These online journals often allow visitors to post comments, and spammers have found ways to locate the blogs and automatically send off comments. Recently, one popular trade union blog here in the UK was hit by over 60 spam comments in a single day. (Fortunately, anti-spam software already exists that can block most of these attacks.)
As if that wasn’t enough, even the humble Wiki — a tool designed for collaborative document authoring and made popular by the online encyclopedia known as the Wikipedia — has been targetted by spammers.
All of this is bad news for trade unions which are making increasing use of e-mail, websites, mobile phones and even blogging. And as more trade unionists discover the joys of instant messaging and Wikis, they will discover even more spammers anxious to ruin their online experience.
There are defences against spam, both e-mail spam and the newer varieties, and trade unionists need to be made aware of these.
If we don’t take steps now to defeat spam, we risk reducing the effectiveness of this extraordinary tool (the Internet). People will use e-mail less and less, they will turn away from weblogs which are full of spam comments, and they will not even be willing to try out new technologies like instant messaging and Wikis. For trade unions which have so much at stake in the high-speed, low cost means of communication that is the Internet, we cannot let that happen.