Paper Overview
Title: The Impact of Unsolicited Email on Information Security
Author: Mahmood H. Shubbak
Date: April 2014
Pages: 15
Abstract
Spam, or the unsolicited email messages are widely considered as risk on information security of both individual and businesses. It wastes users’ time, reduces their productivity and costs organisations huge amount of money on storage units and spam filters. It also might incorporate with various types of fraud, data phishing, and malware. Moreover, spam costs the email service providers an extreme unnecessary share of the global email traffic. In this research paper, a brief explanation of the spam problem, its types, and statistics on its global volume, sources and themes are provided. In addition, the economical driving factors for spammers, their methods in collecting valid email addresses and building Botnets, as well as the negative impact of their activities are explained in the second part of this paper. In the last part, an overview of the regulating laws in the United Kingdom; the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, and the United States of America; the CAN-SPAM 2003 act, as well as the commonly used reduction methods by the email providers’ servers, and best practice instructions for users to mitigate the spam risk on their information security.
Full Paper PDF and PPT Presentation:
Spam Impact on Information Security.pdf
Computer Spam and Inf. Security.ppt
Table of Contents
- Abstract
- Introduction
- What is Spam?
- Spam Types
- Statistics and Figures
- Spam Volume
- Spam Sources and Themes
- Driving Factors
- Email Addresses Harvesting
- Spam Impact
- Legal Aspects
- Reduction Methods
- Users Level
- Email Providers Level
- Spamming Botnets Takedown
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- References
Figures
- Figure 1: Screenshot of mail inbox full of Spam (HBE, 2008)
- Figure 2: CryptoLocker; example of spam-transmitted malware (Cisco, 2014)
- Figure 3: Spam percentage of overall email traffic in 2013
- Figure 4: The volume of Spam in global email traffic in 2013 (SIO, 2014)
- Figure 5: Advertising percentage in Media
- Figure 6: The top ten global spam origins and languages (Cisco, 2013)
- Figure 7: The top themes for spam messages worldwide in 2013 (Cisco, 2014)
- Figure 8: The parasitic economics of spam (Cobb, 2003)
- Figure 9: The percentage of the blocked, filtered, and delivered messages by Microsoft
Tables
- Table 1: Comparison between different advertisement methods (Boehme & Holz, 2006)
- Table 2: Spam Reduction Methods Summary
Many thanks to HapStance Films for the fantasic video!