Stopping spam at the source

updated 2:40 p.m. ET April 15, 2005

NEW YORK - There's a new strategy in the spam battle: Call it containment. Filters for blocking junk e-mail from inboxes have improved to the point that doing much more will needlessly kill legitimate e-mail, said Carl Hutzler, America Online Inc.'s anti-spam coordinator. So e-mail gatekeepers are shifting gears.

Now they're getting more aggressive at keeping spam from leaving their systems in the first place.

EarthLink Inc., for instance, is phasing in a requirement that customers' mail programs submit passwords before it will send out their e-mail.

Like most Internet providers, EarthLink previously made sure only that a computer was associated with a legitimate account. Now that viruses can co-opt computers and use them to send spam, that's no longer secure enough.

So Earthlink sent out new software, made automated tools available for download and walked customers through manually changing their mail settings when they called tech support for other reasons. A year into the initiative, EarthLink has 80 percent of its customers converted.

"Any action can be a little daunting when you're trying to migrate millions of people," said Stephen Currie, EarthLink's director of communications products.

It also costs time and money — not insignificant considering that direct benefits don't necessarily go to EarthLink but to its competitors, whose customers might otherwise receive more spam.

But more than altruism was involved.

"If there's a lot of spam or abusive mail coming from a particular network, in the future you're going to see that e-mail having low rates of deliverability," Currie said.

In other words, other Internet service providers, or ISPs, might start blocking EarthLink e-mail if it doesn't adopt the outbound controls.

The pressure to improve outbound controls comes as viruses infect more and more home computers and convert them into spam-relayng "zombies."

These zombies allow spammers to pose as legitimate customers and get around blocks that Internet providers might have had in place.

Although antispam advocates say Internet providers can do more to stop spammers from signing up for accounts — sometimes fraudulently, but too often because they mean revenues and sales commissions — Hutzler blames zombies for 90 percent of the spam problem.

Traditional spam controls, the inbound filters, don't work as well with zombies because they can block mail from legitimate customers, too. Outbound controls can target specific zombies.

"The best place to stop spam is before it's sent," said John Reid, a volunteer with The Spamhaus Project anti-spam group. "If you can keep it in the bag, bottled up, that's where it's the least expensive."

MORE FROM SECURITY

Security Section Front

Internet activists push for greater democracy EU assembly adopts Internet, phone user rights 'Mr. Right' grifts widow's $50K in Web scam U.K. cops arrest people ‘just for the DNA’ Virus attacks ‘jail broken’ iPhones China attacks ‘biased’ U.S. cyber-spying report Chinese military Web site target of cyberattacks FBI: Hackers targeting law and PR firms House pushes ban on peer-to-peer software Facebook hit by ‘Control Your Info’ intruder Security Section Front   Add Security headlines to your news reader: