Adventures in Computing

Adventures in Computing
In the beginning, there was DOS...

Murder By Spam

To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has happened... yet.

Someone living somewhere on the planet, perhaps next door to you, and perhaps on the other side of the globe, sends out a few million copies of an email to a list of email addresses that he or she purchased from a fellow spammer.

The email is allegedly selling some sort of medicine... it could be the ever-popular 'Penis Pillz', it could be the also ever-popular Vicodin, or it could be, as was on the news just today, being offered for sale by spammers... a generic version of Tamiflu... a drug being touted as possible protection against Bird Flu.

In the case of today's new story about spammers selling 'generic Tamiflu' (it was bogus, vitamin C or something, not the real thing) the spammers were selling something harmless.

In my scenario, though, the spammers are selling cyanide, or anthrax, or worse still, plague, or smallpox, or some other highly contagious biological agent.

In my opinion, this nightmare scenario is bound to happen. I am surprised, given the current world climate of murderous hatred, that it has (apparently) not happened yet, on some sort of massive scale.

When spam first appeared on the Internet, it was a minor annoyance. Then, over a period of years, it gradually became a major annoyance. By the beginning of the new Millennium, it had escalated to a huge problem, costing tens of millions, then hundreds of millions, and now billions of dollars per year, to human societies around the globe.

Spammers and Virus writers, under the aegis of Organised Crime, merged their skills, so that viruses could be sent using the spam distribution method, and the new forms of viruses, unlike their older cousins, are designed to take control of the computers they infect, and to behave stealthily, so that the computer owner will not be aware that the computer has been compromised. Instead, the infected computer is being used to send more spam, and to host whatever those who illegally control it, decide to use it for... child pornography, Al Qaeda Jihad training videos, phishing scams... anything they decide.

In its history, spam has travelled an exponentially descending spiral, from selling junk, to selling lies, to selling perversions, to blackmail, identity theft, extortion, and hijacking people's computers.

Murder seems, to my eye, to be a logical next step.

Two questions seem worth asking...

1) What can be done, to combat spam and spammers, and...

2) What will happen to spam, after the first few thousand people die, eating cyanide instead of the medicine (or Penis Pillz) they thought they were buying... or after the first several million people die as a result of some highly contagious and fatal biological agent being sold over the Internet, as Viagra, Tamiflu, or some other medicine?

For question number one, in my opinion, combating spam is a waste of time. The real solution is in going after the spammers... but who are 'the spammers'? I suspect that increasingly, the spammers are career criminals, with the number of people spamming for a quasi-legitimate profit, and the older UCE (unsolicited commercial email) reasons, on the decline.

I think that most modern spam, no matter what it might suggest, has as its motive identity theft, or the hijacking of the recipient's computer. It might be enticing you to buy something, or to visit a juicy porn site, but if one is foolish enough to pay for something, there is an excellent chance that one's identity will be stolen, and one's bank accounts emptied. Visiting a website... a porn site, a purchase site, or a phishing site that looks like eBay, or your bank, might also be a point of virus infection, as many modern computer worms, and other malicious applications, infect a person's computer through their browser, without the person having to even click on anything. After that, your computer is probably being used as a spam relay, a porn host, and emailing everything you type to the bad guys, while your disabled anti-virus ware reassuring tells you that everything is Ok.

In addition to career criminals, a growing number of the spammers are murderers, kidnappers, and people with religious and political agenda, operating independently, and possibly even with the permission or blessing of their governments, or Religious Bosses.

The Nigeria 4-1-9 scam, one of the oldest mass-emailing scams, is almost certainly operating with the Ok of the Nigerian government... at least where the scammers are operating out of Nigeria... the Nigerian 4-1-9 scam having become immensely popular, and global in scope.

The Jakartan Islamist, Imam Samudra, who was charged with engineering the devastating Bali nightclub bombings... http://www.michigan.gov/techtalk/0,1607,7-167-21007-106615--,00.html ...published a credit card fraud primer, titled 'Hacking, Why Not?'. It isn't a very big step, to go from committing credit card fraud to finance bombings, to just skipping the intermediate steps, and using spam as a death-delivering tool directly.

One would not even have to ship the poison, explosives, etc., through customs... the 'suicide spammer' would just have to travel to the country they planned on wreaking havoc in, and once there, purchase or make the poisons, etc., they needed, locate local victims using spam, and then ship their deadly payloads via the post office, or another, less carefully regulated carrier, like United Parcel Service, DHL, or even a local bicycle courier service.

Just as spam and computer virus technology were blended, to form a more sophisticated attack, so can spam and the various 'on the ground' delivery services be combined, into a blended attack. For a 'suicide spammer', covering their tracks would not even be necessary... once they had accomplished their mission, killing people and spreading terror, they could just sit back and wait for the police to arrive, and blow themselves and the police up, all at once.

So who will be the 'big players' in spam, for the immediate future?

My guess would include an ever-increasing percentage of really evil people... various Organised Crime rings, like the Russian Mob, some National Governments, like North Korea, China, Iran, and of course the old original, Nigeria. Also, I expect to see Al Qaeda, and other non-National extremists groups, looking to spam, both for raising funds, and as a terror delivery system.

Now, about the second question I posed...

What will happen to spam, after the first few thousand people die, eating cyanide instead of the medicine (or Penis Pillz) they thought they were buying... or after the first several million people die as a result of some highly contagious and fatal biological agent being sold over the Internet, as Viagra, Tamiflu, or some other medicine?

This nightmare scenario, might actually wind up doing what no-one has been yet able to do... actually dealing a death blow to spam.

Spam depends on one thing, in order to succeed... people have to read it, and reply to it, and get out their credit cards, and click on the links in the spam, and order the Penis Pillz, and the glass dildos, and the pornography, and the other demented stuff, that spam promises.

Once spam turns into a homicidal enterprise, there probably will not be enough suckers left, to permit spam any viability.

With this kind of possible endgame scenario on the horizon for spam... its demise being precipitated, by its unstoppable spiral into a truly evil enterprise, it is not beyond the scope of imagination, that a load of 'poison pillz' might not wind up being delivered by someone who actually hated spam so much, that they committed mass murder, disguised as a spammer.

Spam might be able to survive indefinitely, if it was an enterprise engaged in only by the 'merely degenerate'... but it appears that one way or another, the 'truly evil' will wind up killing it, the same way they kill everything they touch.

-wittig 05